Bumble Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Bumble Q4 and year-end earnings conference call. At this time, all participant lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Bryn Lee Johnson from the Blue Shirt Group. Thank you. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you for joining us to discuss Bumble's fourth quarter and full year 2020 financial results. With me today is Whitney Wolperd, founder and CEO, Tarek Chakit, president, and a new librarian, CFO of Bumble. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements made on this call today are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and reflect our current expectations based on our beliefs, assumptions, and information currently available to us. Although we believe these expectations are reasonable, we undertake no obligation to revise any statements to reflect changes that occur after this call. Descriptions of these factors and other risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are discussed in more detail in our filings with the SEC. including the prospectus for our initial public offering filed with the SEC on February 12th, 2021, and our subsequent periodic filings, such as our upcoming annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2020. During the call, we also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not a substitute for or in an elation from our GAAP results. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are available in today's earnings press release, which is available on our investor relations website, at ir.bumble.com. With that, I'll turn it over to Whitney.

Thank you, Brynn Leanne. Thank you all for joining Bumble's first earnings call. We are so excited about advancing our mission and our leadership position in the online dating and connection space as we strive to create a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable. As we celebrate International Women's Day and Women's History Month, I want to take a moment to honor and thank all of the incredible women leaders that have come before me and have paved the way for more women to be in the same seat that I am in today. I'm proud to say that over 70% of our board and over 50% of our senior management team are women. We've shown that when you prioritize women in business, you can be a part of positive change and simultaneously fuel shareholder value. Now let's shift gears to our earnings. We achieved strong fourth quarter results, closing out a great 2020. Our fourth quarter revenue increased 31% year-over-year to $166 million, driven by a significant increase in paying users across both Bumble and Badoo apps. For the full year 2020, revenue increased 19% year-over-year to $582 million, fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was 44 million and full year adjusted EBITDA was 152 million. We ended 2020 with over 2.5 million paying users, up 22% year over year, demonstrating the power of our brands and our success in continuing to attract new customers. Before sharing some highlights from Q4 and outlining our priorities for 2021, For those new to the story, I want to share some background on Bumble. Bumble Inc. is the umbrella brand of Bumble and Badoo, the two apps. I founded Bumble in 2014 as the solution to what I believed was broken in relationships. From my time working at the forefront of the rise in mobile dating and from my personal experiences, I had firsthand insight into both what worked and even more importantly, what could be improved upon for women in dating and their relationships. I was able to identify immense white space, recognizing that the products on the market were focused on only the male experience. There was a clear need for a woman-first online dating platform, a product with the woman's experience in mind. In order to build the product technology and platform for women, I had to start by fixing what I thought is broken for them. First, for too long, women around the globe have been told not to go first. They've been told to wait. And second, the Internet is not accountable. It doesn't encourage good behavior, and it doesn't have guardrails to protect women. When you layer these two issues, the gender inequity becomes exacerbated. So I set out to address these two fundamental issues in relationships with the creation of Bumble. Bumble app is the women-first dating and relationship platform. We put women's wants, needs, and safety at the core of everything, from product and engineering to marketing. On Bumble, women must always make the first move and send the first message. This helps recalibrate gender norms by giving women control at the start of the relationship, from that very first message. This makes connections better for everyone. This does not alienate or isolate men. In fact, it makes their experience better. and makes relationships better and more meaningful for all. So when I founded Bumble, I did so in partnership with Badoo and their global team. I did this to leverage their years of technology infrastructure, their product resources, and their vast international scale. I identified a massive market opportunity and knew we had a differentiated approach. The total addressable market for dating is enormous, and the other ancillary verticals for relationships online are even bigger. Given our brand and our relentless focus on product leadership, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. But this is just the beginning. We want to build the preeminent global women's brand and to be there through the woman's entire life cycle. This is so much bigger than just our apps alone. Through our mission, we're building a movement and a brand that connects deeply with people around the world. Our platform is purposely designed for us to diversify outside of dating. We've always had this in mind. In fact, our friendship and networking offerings, Bumble BFF and Bumble Biz, are a derivative of our users looking for opportunities to meet new people platonically and professionally through our app. Our performance this past year has proven the durability of our business model. Through the pandemic, our team reacted quickly to the changing landscape where people became increasingly comfortable with leveraging technology to interact with others. Women engagement in particular has increased during COVID, and we've continued to see strong paying user growth and user engagement, which will enable us to emerge from the pandemic in an even stronger position. allowing us to continue to grow in the post-COVID environment. Much like Q3, Q4 demonstrated our team's ability to mobilize during the ongoing pandemic and to provide features across Bumble app and the Do app in a manner that drove notable growth in users and engagement. On Bumble app, recent launches like our COVID preferences, our improved unmatched process, Safety Center and our body shaming policy underscore our commitment to prioritizing safety and accountability to enhance the user experience. For example, the updated unmatched process makes it impossible for a bad actor to unmatch with someone without that user having the option to report any bad behavior to our moderation team. This advance represents another industry first for Bumble and provides added protection for our users. We also launched our second revenue tier, Bumble Premium, with a range of additional value-added features such as incognito mode and travel mode. We are pleased with the results we've seen so far, and we expect the global rollout to be completed in 2021. Additionally, we launched Reactions, which gives users the ability to provide emoji-based feedback on photos in their profile, providing another way for people to discover and match with each other and we launched our Make the First Move campaign, showcasing the inspiring love stories of the couples that met on Bumble during COVID. This was coupled with a Dating 101 in 2021 guide. On the Bidoo app in Q4, we furthered our mission of dating honestly through the rollout of moods and statuses. This new feature allows users to express themselves deeper through emojis and by adding statuses that reflect their current moods, such as ready to chat, message me, looking to meet up, and many others. To date, we've seen a significant increase in chat activity and chat initiations. Given the user sentiment we have seen in the pandemic in different countries, we shifted our marketing focus on higher ROI campaigns and pair acquisition at the expense of malgrowth. We believe this has been the right tradeoff to position the brand for future growth as conditions improve in regions like Brazil and Western Europe. As our momentum continues in 2021 and beyond, we are laser focused on three top priorities, driving scale, increasing monetization, and improving profitability. First, we are driving scale by growing our user base and improving conversion. In our existing markets for both Bumble and Bidoo app, our plans include continued efforts to attract new users through marketing and product innovation, Our users connect deeply with our brands, making them powerful marketing tools, which generate word of mouth, virality, and powerful network effects, thus driving user growth and strong unit economics. We're also growing through international expansion. The power of our mission, coupled with our expertise in building local market ecosystems across both Bumble and Badoo apps, helps us expand efficiently. For example, Bumble app, We have seen our playbook work well in India, Mexico, and Germany, where we have seen rapid acceleration of users in the last few quarters. We can draw on these lessons to accelerate expansion into markets such as Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Technology is at the core of what differentiates our platform and enables us to remain customer-obsessed. Driving our growth is our continued investment in product features and functionality and built on the foundation of safety and accountability that is so core to everything we do. In particular, we see a real opportunity to build for the post COVID environment, where we expect our users to continue some of the slow and virtual dating behaviors that they've adopted through the pandemic. We expect the future to be a much more robust mix of online and offline, even more so than what we saw pre-pandemic. And we're also expanding beyond just dating. We're going into new categories. We see a huge opportunity here, and we're just at the very early stages. We've seen strong engagement from our two ancillary products, Bumble BFF, which is for platonic relationships, and Bumble Biz, which is for professional relationships. We're planning to increase our focus on Bumble BFF with an emphasis on enhancing the product beyond the minimum viable product and then driving real user engagement. Next, we are focused on improving monetization. We are still early in our monetization journey, and we expect to increase paying users and our people over time for both Bumble and the new apps. We're developing new monetization features and improving existing features in order to increase adoption of in-app purchases and our subscription programs. We're also testing new pricing strategies, including different tiers and user segmentation. And finally, we believe that we will be able to improve our profitability as our business continues to scale. Our near-term focus is on making strategic investments and growing our community, our product, and our technology to capitalize on the large market opportunity that exists. Our financial model is characterized by a rare combination of growth, scale, strong profitability, and cash flow generation, and this positions us well for the long term. Our IPO was a pivotal milestone, but we're truly just getting started and we're so excited for the next chapter of our journey. And now more than ever, people all over the world have come to understand the fundamental value of healthy and meaningful relationships in their lives. Looking ahead, we believe that as the world slowly transitions back to a post-pandemic lifestyle, more customers will have identified the value proposition that online dating really truly offers them. And we expect that there's a lot of pent-up demand from people who have been avoiding in-person dating altogether during COVID. So not only have we been hyper-resilient through COVID, we believe we are going to benefit significantly and that we are well-positioned in the reopening as well. So in conclusion, Bumble is more than our app. Our mission is powering a movement, and this approach ensures that our values guide our business decisions and that our business performance enables us to drive impact. Our strategy is anchored by our powerful brand, product leadership, operational excellence, and impact initiatives. In 2021, we will focus on driving scale and increasing our active users, improving our monetization, and positioning Bumble Inc. for long-term profitability. So before signing off, I want to thank our amazing team who have shown incredible resilience through a very difficult year. Without you, we would not be where we are today. And thank you so much to our partners and to our investors. I look forward to keeping you all updated on our progress. And with that, I will turn it over to Anu to discuss our financial performance.