Bumble Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Bumble Incorporated first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in the 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, then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you require any further assistance, please press star, then 0. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Cheryl Valenzuela. Ma'am, you may begin.

Thank you for joining us to discuss Bumble's first quarter financial results. With me today are Whitney Wolf-Herd, founder and CEO, Tarek Shawkat, president, and Anusa Brahmanian, 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, 2021, and our subsequent periodic filing. During the call, we also refer to 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 GAAP results. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP 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. We had an excellent first quarter, achieving total group revenue of $211 million, driven by continued strength in Bumble app. Our total paying users exceeded 3 million, with Bumble app adding 134,000 paying users sequentially. We also delivered profitable revenue growth, with adjusted EBITDA of $50 million. I'm proud of these strong financial results, which are a testament to our team's execution against our long-term strategy. The world has seen heightened macroeconomic concerns this quarter, including the conflict in Ukraine and inflation. Many areas of the global market continue to struggle with COVID. I'm very grateful to our team for navigating through these challenges, including the difficult decision we made to discontinue our Russia operations. As we have seen throughout the pandemic, The need for love and connection endures through both positive and challenging times, and we are laser-focused on always being there to support our users. The countless success stories we hear around relationships, marriages, and births is the inspiration that drives us every day, and we are excited about the opportunity this represents. Let's start with Bumble Apps. Q1 revenue grew 38% year-over-year to $155 million. fueled by growth in both paying users and our people. We saw strong revenue performance in both our traditional markets as well as in our international growth markets. The U.S. remains a very important region for us. In Q1, based on third-party data, we expanded our download share and strengthened our number two position in the market. We still have substantial opportunity to grow in the U.S., And our continued pace of our user engagement is a sign of the runway we believe we have as markets continue to reopen and COVID becomes endemic. Within our international growth markets, we are proud of our continued progress across Western Europe, Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America. In Q1, Bumble app became the second most downloaded dating app in Germany and revenue across the broader doc region almost doubled year over year. Our on-the-ground field marketing-oriented approach, grounded in our mission, generates authentic word of mouth and continues to resonate internationally. We are seeing this success start to be replicated in our newer markets, such as France, the Netherlands, and Mexico as well. This broad-based geographic growth underscores the strength of our business that is focused on engineering women-first experiences and providing our users with safe, trusted, and accountable environments. Over the years, Bumble app has built a remarkable community of users who are strong advocates for the brand and who actively share their positive experiences on the app with their friends and their social connections. Bumble app's top of funnel remains healthy, and we continue to add a majority of our new users organically. Additionally, throughout the pandemic, we have seen re-engagement drive monthly active user growth on a consistent basis. This is when users who had gone dormant on Bumble for a variety of reasons, including those that took a break from dating due to COVID, returned to our app. The strong brand loyalty we have brings them back when they're ready to resume dating and extends our lifetime value. We have a robust product development agenda for Bumble app this year and are in the process of rolling out a range of innovations globally. I want to spend just a few minutes walking you through some highlights. Fundamentally, people join Bumble to find someone they connect with in a trusted and safe way. We are launching a range of discovery-oriented features to make our platform more powerful for both women and men. Earlier this week, we rolled out our new compliments feature and select markets as a first step in our global rollout. With compliments, people are able to send short pre-matched messages to potential connections to show a little more of their personality and build more of a personal connection. We've also recently launched in these markets pre-matched audio profile elements and a new and improved experience for our non-binary users. Another theme we are focusing on is hybrid experiences. As the world continues to reopen, we want Bumble app to become a go-to companion for this online and offline hybrid world. Our product and marketing initiatives are focused on combining the power of Bumble apps with the excitement of meeting in real life. We recently launched our Beaky event access system, which provides QR codes inside of our app to give you access to unique real-world experiences. We are building on this with a major initiative called Bumble IRL, which we launched last month in partnership with leading brands, such as SoulCycle, Topgolf, and the James Beard Foundation, we are offering our users across the U.S. access to a year-long slate of in-person events, ranging from food and beverage tastings at women-owned restaurants to live music, sports, and volunteer events. All of these are designed to help our users find and easily connect with other singles who have shared interests. Additionally, we are expanding our pioneering Honey Campus Ambassador Program, which now has nearly 600 ambassadors across colleges in the U.S. We will be rolling out new product integrations just in time for the summer break and the new school year, helping college students stay connected when they leave campus and then reconnect when they return. Bumble started on college campuses, and we are big believers in the power of these campus communities. These are just a few examples of what we can do when we combine our unique brand with a distinctive product experience. Our approach to monetization builds on these efforts by providing value-added experiences that users are willing to pay for. For example, in Q1, we launched a series of enhancements to Beeline, a popular feature in our higher-priced Bumble Premium subscription tier. The enhanced Beeline offers better ways to manage inbound activity, such as enabling users to sort by the closest connections or the most recent likes. The redesign drove significant improvement in payers and will lay the foundation for further product enhancements and optimizations. As you will recall, 2021 was focused on driving adoption of our premium subscription tier, while 2022 will be focused on driving further payer growth by expanding lower price entry points through both subscriptions and consumables. We began testing virtual goods this quarter in several markets in the U.S. In these markets, users now have the option to upgrade their Super Swipe, which lets their connections know that they like them with a gift such as virtual flowers. In our initial test, we have seen strong engagement in virtual goods from our Gen Z users. This is exciting as it creates a more fun and dynamic experience while being the basis of our future in-app consumable economies. We expect that virtual goods will launch later this year, part of a strong monetization roadmap we had planned for the second half of 2022. We continue to make strong progress with our friend-finding service, Bumble BFF. Our North Star with the enhanced Bumble BFF offering is to provide high-frequency, low-stakes ways for people to discover and get to know each other around shared joys and common struggles. The results so far of our ongoing alpha test have been very positive. We have found that with limited promotion, over 40% of active BFF users are becoming actively engaged with new experiences we're offering. And retention after one month was upwards of 75%. We plan to roll out more features and expand to other user segments in Q2. Now turning to Badoo app and other. Revenue for Q1 was 56 million, a decrease of 4% year over year. As we've noted, Bidu has a sizable presence in Central and Eastern Europe, and I want to start with an update on the Ukraine conflict. Since our announcement in March, we have removed our apps in Russia and Belarus and also removed paywalls in Ukraine. These decisions, coupled with significant FX headwinds, are the reasons for the decline. Bidu is a high-scale, valued brand across the world and remains a top-three lifestyle app in dozens of countries. We're helping people everywhere find love, Millions of people connect and build relationships every year on Bidu. For example, just this March, we partnered with two of our users, Christina and Antonio, to help them celebrate their wedding. Our campaign featuring them went viral across Spain and Latin America, driving an increase in organic registrations. Building on successes like this, we believe Bidu has room to grow as we navigate the current situation in Eastern Europe and as the COVID situation improves. We are actively adjusting our marketing approach to reflect the macro environment, and we scaled back on Bidoo brand marketing substantially in late Q1 as we assess the conflict's impact on our user base more broadly. As the situation stabilizes, we will be opportunistically looking to expand our marketing activities again while continuing our strict discipline around ROI and short payback periods. From a product standpoint, in Q1, we focused on ongoing optimization of our user experience within Bidoo. We've been experimenting with new ways to boost engagement and user acquisition, including rolling out short-form video capabilities on user profiles and streamlining our in-app coin economy. We expect to lean into these areas throughout 2022 to provide more reasons for people to use Bidoo when the pandemic recedes and users re-enter the dating scene. Bumble Inc. has always been a leader in ensuring trust and safety in online dating. In Q1, we achieved some important milestones. We launched an industry-first partnership with Bloom, a remote trauma support service to offer complimentary online support globally to users of both Bumble and Badoo who report sexual assault or relationship abuse. We continue to invest in technology such as machine learning and AI to create spaces that users can trust by filtering out unwanted content and images. In parallel, we continue to advocate for women's digital safety globally. and we are excited to announce that Bumble-supported cyber flashing campaigns have made advances in the UK and the US, including a bill that was recently passed into law in Virginia. We are encouraged by the opportunity we see on the horizon. We have navigated successive waves of the pandemic, serving our users who are looking for love and willing to put themselves out there. We know that there are many who are still cautious about COVID, but we also hear from many who are looking to go out and meet people more actively. So while there's a fair bit of macro uncertainty clouding our visibility, we are optimistic about the return to a more normal environment. We are creating our own tailwinds by focusing on product innovation, international expansion, and operational excellence so that we can continue to deliver strong results. In closing, I'd like to thank our team for their hard work and unwavering commitment to our mission. I'd also like to thank all of our customers, partners, and investors who for their continued trust and support. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anu for a more detailed discussion of our financials.