Bumble Inc.

standing by and welcome to the Bumble fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question at that time, please press star then one on your touchtone telephone. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Ms. Cheryl Valenzuela. Ma'am, you may begin.

Thank you. And thank you all for joining us to discuss Bumble's fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results. With me today are Whitney Wolf-Herd, founder and CEO, Tarek Shawkat, president, and Anu Subramanian, CFO of Bumble. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain statements may be made on this call today that 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 statement 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 earnings press release and filings with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, and our subsequent periodic filings. For purposes of today's call, comparisons to full year 2020 are based on the company's results for the combined periods of January 1st, 2020 to January 28th, 2020 and January 29th, 2020 to December 31st, 2020. During the call, we also referred certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from our gap results. Reconciliations to the most comparable gap measures are available in today's earnings press release, which is available on the investor relations section of our website at ir.bumble.com. And with that, I'll turn it over to Whitney.

Thanks, Cheryl. Good afternoon, and thank you all for taking the time to join our call today. I'd like to start with Russia and Ukraine. I know this is top of mind for everyone. First and foremost, our hearts go out to all who are impacted by this tragic conflict. We hope for a swift resolution to the situation. We are a mission-driven company. Given the current circumstances, our presence in Russia is inconsistent with our values as a business. We are therefore discontinuing our operations in Russia and removing all of our apps from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in Russia and Belarus. We do not take this decision lightly, and we've been working tirelessly to ensure the safety and well-being of our team in the region. However, we believe this is the right decision, reflecting who we are and what we stand for. Here are the facts about our presence in Russia. For starters, substantially all of our technical workforce, including product development, data science, and engineering, is based in the U.S., U.K., and Spain. For example, 95% of our dedicated Bumble app software development teams are based in the UK and Spain. Similarly, our entire cybersecurity team is based outside of Russia, primarily in the UK. None of our senior leadership team is based in Russia. Out of our 980 global employees, only 120 team members are in Russia. While we value all of our team members in Russia, and we're working with each of them on a case-by-case basis, the skill set of our team in Russia is replicated in our engineering centers outside of Russia. Additionally, we have made a number of changes since 2020, such as the establishment and scaling of our Barcelona engineering hub, the creation of additional EU data center locations, and the expansion of our U.S.-based leadership team, all of which gives us great confidence in our ability to make this exit a smooth transition. Additionally, we have no employees in Ukraine or Belarus, Looking at our operations, no part of Badoo app or Bumble app and none of our user data are hosted or stored inside of Russia. We use data centers in the EU and US to serve our applications globally. The only user data that lives in Russia is a backup of Russian customer data as required by local law. In 2021, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine together amounted to only about 2.8% of total company revenue. Less than 0.1% of Bumble app revenue is from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine combined. We are factoring the impact of this situation into our outlook, and Anu will provide more information about this shortly. Now, let me turn to our results. Looking back, 2021 was a very strong year for us. I'm very proud of the strong business that we have built, which combines organic growth and engagement at scale with profitability and cash flows. For full year 2021, group revenue increased 32% year-over-year to $766 million, an acceleration in growth rate from 19% in 2020. This growth was driven by Bumble app revenue at $533 million, which grew 48% year-over-year compared to 31% in 2020. We grew our global scale with continued success throughout the Americas, Europe, India, and Southeast Asia. and reached 2.9 million paying users for the year, up 16%, and average revenue per paying user, our PIPO, up 15% year over year. All of this was achieved while generating higher profitability. Our 2021 adjusted EBITDA increased 36% year over year to 207 million, representing a 27% margin versus 26% in 2020. In Q4, we delivered record revenue of $208.2 million and adjusted EBITDA of $55 million, continuing the strong traction we saw all year. Again, this was driven by the strength of Bumble app, while Badoo faced some headwinds related to Omicron and FX. According to third-party data sources, as of December 2021, Badoo remains the second most downloaded dating app in the world, and Bumble app is now the third most downloaded dating app globally. up from number seven in early 2020. We were thrilled to welcome fruit last month, adding an exciting and rapidly growing dating app targeting Gen Z to our group. So now let me update you on each of our apps. Bumble app continues to accelerate growth and gain share. Our brand continues to be a powerful engine of organic growth, with Q4 revenue growing 42%, to 150.5 million. Bumble paying users reached more than 1.6 million in Q4, up 29% year-over-year, and up 108,000 paying users sequentially, both accelerations from the 20% year-over-year growth and the 60,000 net ads we reported in Q3. This reflects the power of our mission-first brand, the strong engagement on our platform, our international expansion efforts, and continuous improvements in our monetization strategy. I'm particularly happy to report these results to you on International Women's Day. Women's equality is core to our mission and a driving force for our success. We are so proud that over 50% of our management team and over 70% of our board members are women. Bumble's app success is built on five pillars. Our Women First brand centered on building safer, kinder technology for all, product experiences that engage our users in an impactful way, helping them find dates, friends, and community, the pace and momentum of our international expansion, alongside shared gain in core markets, the introduction of new paid experiences and tiers, and expansion beyond dating. We believe that one of Bumble's core and unique strengths is how well the brand resonates, with both women and men globally. We've seen this with our success in markets as varied as the U.S., Indonesia, India, Germany, and Mexico. Our brand is our moat, and we continue to invest in it through a wide range of channels, including organic and digital marketing, our college ambassador programs, and our user safety initiatives. We continue to be a leader in advocating for new laws and regulations to curb online abuse and harassment. We believe in driving trust, kindness, and accountability on the internet, and we believe this is a critical initiative that we are so proud to be leading. We led the charge in Texas several years ago to criminalize sending unsolicited lewd images, an activity we call cyber flashing, and we have seen this campaign advance in several other states in the US as well as the UK. On the product side, We were excited to see our efforts recognized by Apple, who named us one of their top 15 apps of the year for 2021. As a reminder, our product development strategy is always to help users find the most relevant matches quickly and safely. This is the key to achieving our mission of healthy and equitable relationships. We do this through continuous optimization of the user experience, a strong discipline of A-B testing, and sophisticated machine learning and data science driven personalization, as well as new and engaging features. This approach continues to pay off, with our key engagement metrics continuing to increase year over year in Q4. We have a very active product development calendar planned for 2022. Our focus has moved from post-match experiences, which were important to our success at the height of the COVID pandemic, to pre-match discovery experiences. We are listening to our users' requests for more tools to express themselves and are innovating our video and audio features, providing more opportunities to use Bubble to connect in real life and more ways to find people who have the same interests and passions as them. We are actively developing and testing a range of new features and experiences that will improve the product for college students, LGBTQIA plus users, and women users on our platform, just to name a few. You'll start seeing these features deployed at scale in Q2 and in Q3, just in time for the peak summer season. In terms of international expansion, we continue to see tremendous success outside of the U.S. Active user growth in many markets in Western Europe, including Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland, continue to grow at high double-digit rates year over year. These countries are also monetizing at a strong pace, with revenue more than doubling year over year. Our expansion to other parts of Europe, Latin, India, and Southeast Asia also continue to strengthen. Our organic brand-driven approach to international expansion is a unique asset of our company, and it's proving itself around the world. As we've said before, our goal is to have a broad range of people on Bumble app become a paying customer. By creating a menu of experiences, that add substantial value to each of them. Today, approximately 10% of our users pay for any service on Bumble, and we know there is substantial room to grow that number. Our approach to this in 2020 and 2021 was to introduce a premium tier on top of our existing boost tier with additional new features that are additive to a user's experience. More than 75% of paying users are now opting for Bumble Premium when they subscribe, which is a great sign of the value that it provides. Our two-tier model has resulted in substantial improvements in our PPU this past year. With 2021, our PPU of $29.61 up 13% year over year. In 2022, we are broadening our approach. This quarter, we're testing both virtual goods and new consumables, and we expect wider rollout in Q2 and Q3. We also expect to roll out segment-specific subscription offerings later this year. We believe these initiatives will increase revenue by enabling us to target additional price points and user segments. We're excited by all of these initiatives, not just because of their revenue impact, but because we believe that they'll add a lot of value, fun, and excitement to the Bumble experience for our customers. Lastly, beyond dating. We are excited about the improvements that we've made to our current BFF friend-finding product, including the onboarding and discovery flow and anchoring the products around interest and passion. As a result of these initial changes, BFF is growing strongly, with almost 15% of total Bumble users now using Bumble BFF, up from about 10% a year ago. This increasing engagement continues to drive stickiness and lifetime value of our users, and serves as a great on-ramp to dating and back again. We are innovating quickly here. In Q4, we launched our next generation features and testing with users in Canada. We're very pleased with the market reception we have seen. Building on the popular existing use case of creating direct one-to-one connections, the next generation takes into account that many great friendships are often born out of small group interactions. We're building out these new capabilities that will allow groups of people to really build community and meet each other based on shared interests, joys, and struggles. We are now scaling the test and adding new features, including larger group connections and audio-video capabilities. Our focus for 2022 continues to be on scaling and refining the user experience so that we can roll this out to our broader customer base. We grow more and more excited about the runway for BFF and the importance of it to our overall bundle brand, mission, and growth strategy. Now, turning to the Do app and other, Q4 revenue was down 3% year-over-year to $58 million. The Do paying users totaled $1.3 million in Q4, a sequential increase of 5,000 paying users, largely driven by by stabilization post the Android payment issues that we discussed in Q3. Bidu's results in Q4 were negatively impacted by several factors, including Omicron, especially in late Q4, as well as greater than expected FX headwinds in the quarter. I would like to remind everyone of some of the dynamics at play here. Bidu is a scale product, the second most downloaded dating app in the world, and a top-grossing lifestyle app in over 90 countries. It caters to a middle-class segment in virtually every market that it operates in, and it's designed to thrive in a world of quick connections, with its significant feature being an instant connection service called Talk to Someone. COVID has caused significant disruption to this user base, putting increased stress on their finances and their available free time. So the focus on quick connections is also less appealing during COVID surges such as with Omicron in late December and early Q1, leading to new registrations being challenged. To be clear, this impact has been limited to Bidu. We do not see any notable impact on Bumble app due to geographic and demographic differences. Our download share has generally been stable throughout the pandemic. Our goal is to lean into this large global audience through product initiatives, that give people more tools to express themselves and to have fun in the process. For example, by continuing to roll out our video offerings more broadly and increasingly leveraging the virtual coins ecosystem that we've had in place for many years to drive increasing monetization. I'd like to now touch on how we're building out our scale with our first acquisition. I'm thrilled to welcome Fruits to Bumble Inc.' 's family of apps. I have long admired the approach Fruits has taken to encourage honesty and transparency in dating, which is so important to us and aligns with our mission. Fruits is a fast-growing dating app with a Gen Z focus and a strong and rapidly growing footprint in Western Europe and Canada. Since it was founded four years ago, it's captured a sizable user base, 75% of which are Gen Z. And in Q1, Fruits was the second most downloaded app in its home country of France, It's built on the principle that from users' very first interaction, they must select a profile fruit badge as this metaphor to clearly signal their dating intention. Gen Z is an incredibly important audience for us. They are the future. The 2 billion Gen Z generation is estimated to account for 3.4 trillion of global spend and is rapidly aging into dating app usage with this very distinct set of needs and preferences. And while Bumble app continues to drive significant user growth with Gen Z, we know that people have multiple dating apps on their phone, and we're so excited to build fruits into a strong accompaniment to Bumble on Gen Z devices globally. There is great product market fit overall, and we just really believe that combining that with our integrated technology, data science, safety, and marketing platforms will really help them reach their full potential more quickly and efficiently. In closing, the world needs love more than ever before. We are so proud to be in the business of serving this critical human need. As I think about 2022, I'm very optimistic about the state of our business and the opportunities ahead for us. So with that, let me turn it over to Anu for a run-through of our financial and operational results.