Bumble Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Bumble's second quarter 2022 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants 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 1-1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Cheryl Valenzuela, Vice President of Nursing Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us to discuss Bumble's second quarter financial results. With me today are Whitney Wolk-Hurt, founder and CEO, Tarek Shawkat, president, and Anu Subramanian, 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 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 end of December 31st, 2021, and our subsequent periodic filing. During the call, we also referred 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 delivered strong second quarter results, reflecting the power of our product, the relevance of our mission, and the enduring human need for love and connection. We built on our momentum from last quarter into Q2, delivering total group revenue of $220 million, driven by strong growth in Bumble app revenue. Total paying users across Bumble and Badoo apps reached over 3 million, with Bumble app adding over 149,000 paying users sequentially, a greater increase than in each of the past two quarters. We also reported adjusted EBITDA of $55 billion and nearly doubled free cash flow from last year, a strong bottom line result reflecting both revenue growth and continued financial discipline. Bumble apps continue to power our overall growth, with revenue up 33% year-over-year to $170 million, primarily driven by a 31% increase in paying users. Before we dive deeper, I wanted to provide some more context around the resilience we have seen so far within Bumble apps. I founded Bumble to make relationships better, safer, and more equal for women. That remains our North Star and is as important now as at any time in our history because of the unprecedented challenges women are facing. We are grateful to be in a consumer business that helps people with one of their most fundamental needs, building kind and meaningful connections. That need exists whether you are in a pandemic or in a high inflation and recessionary environment. We believe BubbleApp's unique brand and trust with our users, especially women, combined with our leadership and product innovation is what's driving our success in the face of overlapping macro challenges. Our app provides tremendous value when you compare the cost of a monthly subscription with the cost of a typical first date, especially once you factor in the convenience, selection, discovery, fun, and safety features that we offer. Turning back to our Q2 performance, we delivered strong results in Bumble Apps' traditional markets as well as its international growth markets. According to third-party data sources, in the second quarter, we gained download share in almost all of our major markets, including the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Our authentic women-first positioning and our products continue to resonate in both our core markets and internationally. In the U.S. and Canada, we are seeing existing users engage, retain, and reengage at a high rate. Importantly, we are also seeing early signs that new users are coming into the fold now that COVID has become more endemic. Our marketing programs, including Bumble IRL, our expanded college program, and our It Started on Bumble success story platform are resonating with users and helping us increase brand awareness and user engagement. Outside of the U.S. and Canada, we are very pleased with our continued download share gains as well. As a reminder, our international market expansion, like our U.S. growth, is built on the back of our brand and is powered on a foundation of organic user demand. We amplify this demand through our decade-long experience in product localization, our best-in-class field marketing programs, and through influencer and performance marketing. This approach ensures that we build sustainable growth and market depth, not just toeholds in each market. Let's talk about this by region. First, in Western Europe, our market expansion efforts continue to deliver strong results. We are seeing robust user growth across the region and even faster revenue growth. In Germany, Bumble was the number two most downloaded dating app in Q2. The momentum continued into July, and we ended the month with Bumble as the number one most downloaded dating app in Germany, according to multiple third-party data sources. We are incredibly proud of this result and believe it continues to demonstrate the power of our model. We expect to focus over the next several quarters on deepening our presence across our launch markets and expanding into other parts of Western Europe. Next, looking at Latin America, Mexico continues to perform well, and our recent launches in Brazil and Chile have established a strong initial market presence for us. We are continuing to build depth in these markets to drive both user and revenue growth, and we'll be extending our efforts to Colombia and Argentina in the second half of this year. Finally, turning to Asia, we are particularly excited by the traction we are seeing. A lot of activity this year has been focusing on improving the localization of our product in key markets, including for Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese speakers, while amplifying organic demand in our launched markets. India, for example, is a market that continues to deliver for us. And our recent localization improvements and brand initiatives are delivering rapid user growth, with revenue more than doubling year over year. Similarly, our efforts last year in Southeast Asia, including Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, continue to perform well. Looking forward, we are particularly excited by the early results of our localization efforts in North Asia and expect the region to be a focus of our 2023 efforts once the situation on the ground allows. We are also very pleased with our team's execution against our product priorities for this year. We continue to take a thoughtful and user-focused approach to product development, all centered on providing an experience that is designed with the needs of our women customers top of mind. We test our products extensively to make sure they lead to the right outcomes for our users. We then expand to the market to learn from our users and really understand how to land the product at scale. We then roll out to other markets at a fast but responsible pace. In Q2, we brought a broad portfolio of discovery-oriented products to market. We've been testing compliments, our message-before-match offering in Australia and Germany, and based on the positive results we're seeing, we expanded the test earlier this month to select markets in the U.S. We've been encouraged with early results, which suggests that those who send compliments have better, higher-quality matches and conversations. In some markets, we've also been testing a broader suite of product enhancements, such as video and audio, that provide our members with richer and more dynamic profiles. We are encouraged by the engagement in these new product features and anticipate rolling these out to other markets in the future. To better serve our underrepresented communities on Bumble, we also launched substantial product enhancements for LGBTQIA plus people, and we began investing in features that will deliver a significantly improved experience for underrepresented ethnic and cultural backgrounds. These product initiatives are important for our mission and to our user base, especially Gen Z, and will continue to expand our addressable market. Finally, We are experimenting with new engagement models to better serve our women users and help drive matches. To that end, we recently launched a new weekly astrology-oriented event within Bumble app. With over 75% of active Bumble members in the U.S. adopting a Zodiac badge on their profiles, this is something that our user base has asked for through the years. Astrology Tuesdays have led to increases in daily active uses on those days and are an example of how we're working to expand the frequency of use on Bumble by designing through a women's lens, which enriches the experience for all. We pair these engagement driving features with our highly efficient and innovative monetization program. Q2 was focused on a number of paywall and pricing optimizations to drive pair conversions. And as we look to the second half of this year, we have an exciting set of new monetization features being planned. We're just starting our monetization test for compliments, and we continue to be excited with tests around virtual goods. Later this year, we will start launching our segment specific offering, starting with college students and women users. Lastly, I'd like to spend a moment on Bumble BFF. As you know, we are building out our next generation offering, which centers on helping people find platonic connections through small communities which we are calling Hive. As we have shared before, our approach is built on the insight that people want to find friends, acquaintances, and connections through shared struggles and common joys, moving to a new city, navigating parenthood, finding a partner for hiking, or really anything else in between. We have recently expanded our alpha testing to the whole of the greater Toronto area, and we are excited about the results we have seen. With no external promotion, BFF members have created thousands of Hives. Within these new ways to connect, we're seeing a deepening of engagement. We've seen the weekly average number of sessions for these members increase by two-thirds, and their weekly time spent in app is up 16%. We are listening closely to feedback from our early adopters to continue to make it easier and more joyful to discover relevant hives to join, get to know other members in your hive, and coordinate events to spend time in person. Now, turning to our other data gaps, Bidu and other revenue, including fruits, totaled 51 million in Q2, down 14% year-over-year. It has been a challenging first half for Bidu. We, of course, exited Russia and Belarus earlier this year. As Bidoo serves a more economically sensitive user base, it has also felt the effects of COVID and now the macro environment much more than Bumble app. Despite these monetization headwinds, Bidoo continues to be the second most downloaded dating app in the world with a very broad geographic footprint and a high proportion of long-tenured and highly engaged members. We appointed a new general manager for Bidu in Q2, and we are actively working on defining the go-forward product strategy and operating model for the business. In the immediate future, we are focused on simplifying our user experience to make the product easier to understand, with the primary goal of driving higher adoption for our paid features. For example, we've been optimizing our consumable offerings, such as chat for credits and extra shows, which enable users to message before a match and increase their overall activity. While it is early days, in recent months we have seen improving revenue trends in many markets and a return to revenue growth on a constant FX basis in some of our large markets, such as Poland and the Netherlands. Given Badoo's brand and scale, it has organic traction in many long-tail markets, such as Southeast Asia, where we have historically spent very little on product or marketing. We are going to take a more active approach to these by testing both localization and marketing efforts in countries within Southeast Asia. Finally, Q2 marked our first full quarter with Fruits. Fruits is aligned with Bumble Inc.' 's mission by focusing on encouraging transparency and honesty in dating. It particularly resonates with Gen Z users in Western Europe and Canada. We are pleased with the progress on integration. Fruits is already leveraging the expertise of Bumble Inc. in areas such as safety and moderation and strengthening its monetization platform. It continues to be fueled almost entirely by organic demand and has established itself in a closed competition for the most downloaded dating app in France. In closing, our business has been resilient And I am proud of the execution and results our team has delivered. It really is an extraordinary time. We are grateful for the opportunity to earn the support and trust of our users, partners, teams, and investors by focusing on our mission and customers through operational excellence and financial discipline. Now, I will turn it over to Anu to talk about the financials.