Bumble Inc.

press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand over to Cheryl Palenzuela, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us to discuss Bumble's second quarter 2024 financial results. With me today are Bumble CEO, Lidiani Jones, and CFO, Anu Subramanian. 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 factors and 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 31, 2023, and our subsequent periodic filings. 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 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 Lydiane.

Thank you, Cheryl, and good afternoon, everyone. When I joined Bumble seven months ago, we embarked on a plan to strengthen our foundation to deliver long-term growth and profitability. We added outstanding talent to our team. We set our cost structure, reinforced a culture of excellence, and began to reimagine Bumble Apps product to ensure we're delivering the best and most relevant customer experience to women today. As the first dating app built with women at the center, we continue to believe that when dating is better for women, it is better for everyone. That is Scorch Bumble's mission and will remain our priority. In April, we launched the first chapter of Bumble app's evolution, including a refreshed look and feel, improved onboarding and profile creation plans, as well as launched opening moves, which gives women more choice in how conversations get started. This launch was just the first step and was successful in achieving two important objectives, delivering a better experience for women and improving engagement. We have seen increases in users with high-quality profiles, more matches for women, and people voting us across genders. These early wins hoist to the type of customer value that drives long-term sustainable growth. This category is vibrant, and we see tremendous opportunities ahead. But it's evident, to reignite the user growth engine for our company in the long term, we need to take a firm stance towards delivering customer value that goes beyond this launch. We're making the difficult but important decision to reset our strategy to deliver durable customer value, by addressing two fundamental and interconnected challenges. First, we need to ensure we're capturing the right balance and mix of people in our customer ecosystem. This entails correcting demographic imbalances and improving retention by providing our customers with more innovative and compelling dating experiences. And second, we need to monetize more effectively while ensuring a great experience for both our free and paid customers. To address these challenges, we have embarked upon a comprehensive plan that will help us achieve our ultimate goal of making Bumble the number one choice for people to find love, friendship, and community around the world. Our plan is focused on three important areas, ecosystem, the customer experience, and our revenue strategy. Let me detail each one of them. Our first area of focus is fostering a vibrant customer ecosystem. Our customers come to our app to meet people, so getting the right balance, mix, and intent of people in Bumble is fundamental to our success. Strengthening our ecosystem will result in better engagement, improved retention, and ultimately deliver more successful outcomes to our customers. Our product choices going forward will increasingly favor ecosystem health and engagement on Bumble apps. One example is prioritizing more robust profiles for all of our users. We know that creating detailed profiles and adding photos takes time and often causes friction, particularly during onboarding. However, we also know that quality profiles facilitate better engagement and greater customer success, particularly for women. which in turn also makes men's experience better. This April launch gave us some evidence of that. By raising the bar on minimum requirements for new user profiles and photos, we drove immediate improvements to engagement metrics caused by a better experience and more engaged users in our ecosystem. While our efforts may turn away some lower engagement users in the near term, we believe this will ultimately result and a more authentic and better experience for our users over time. Achieving customer balance also involves updating our marketing playbook so that we can acquire the right users in each market. In mature markets where our brand recognition is strong, our focus will be on experiential and re-engagement marketing strategies. While in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, we will expand our brand and digital marketing campaign. To better execute on these goals, we're investing on marketing technology and data, including better analytics capabilities to effectively personalize how we reach our customers and optimize the ROI of our spend off different markets. Our second area of focus is customer experience, which begins with continuous product innovation, an area that I'm personally energized by. and will be more directly engaged with our product and engineering team. We are working on the next chapters of the Bumble apps evolution. And through the fall and early winter, we'll be launching several new features, including more options for making opening news, new interest filters, improvements to our core matching algorithm, as well as customization to our chat timer. We will also introduce new AI-driven features, including An AI assisted photo picker to ease the profile creation process and conversation support that will help our customers gain confidence to be their best selves. We have an ambitious view of how AI will enhance the value we deliver to our customers in each step of the dating journey. Profile creation, discovery, engagement, and the core of our matching models. Another essential part of customer experience is safety and support. Bumble has a strong foundation for safety, and we're doubling down on safety innovation by expanding our efforts to crack down on bad actors, remove duplicate accounts, and add government ID verification on Bumble apps, actions that may have a short-term impact on MAU but will result in better and safer user experiences. We're also optimizing our operations to speed up support and safety resolution while improving our accuracy and quality of service. These initiatives are designed to ensure customers know that they are part of an ecosystem committed to safety and healthy connection. Our third area of focus is evolving our revenue strategy. We are re-evaluating how we deliver value at every step of our customer's journey, from the top of the funnel to peer conversion, while optimizing for LTV. Over time, we'll rebalance Bumble subscription tiers and merchandising in favor of mechanisms that reward positive peer behaviors and support better ecosystem health. As part of this process, we'll slow down certain monetization initiatives in the near term, including the expansion of Premium Plus. Being more deliberate about how we monetize in the near term does not mean that we see less growth opportunities. It means we're treating unsustainable short-term growth in favor of better connecting customer experiences with long-term growth potential. We will also lean on areas of strength and where we see growth opportunities, including BADU, international expansion, and adjacent opportunities like advertising. While the initiatives I've outlined have been primarily about enhancing vulnerable apps, In reality, they extend across our entire portfolio with the goal of building out our offerings to expand our TAM. Badoo has provided us with great proof points of how we orient towards customer value is to better outcomes for them. In Q3, we're planning to roll out brand updates and a re-architecture of the revenue strategy for Badoo with new subscription tiers that are designed to be more affordable and encourage higher engagement. And as I shared last quarter, Bumble is a connections company, and we remain excited by the potential to expand into apps for non-romantic relationships. In July, we closed the acquisition of Geneva, a group and community app for people to connect based on shared interests. Geneva will meaningfully accelerate our opportunity and friendships and community space and we're working towards launching it more broadly later this fall. We have more to share in the coming quarters. In closing, our renewed and relentless focus on customers is essential to unlocking further untapped growth in this category. I want to be clear that I do not take lightly the impact our decisions will have on the near-term growth, but I have high conviction that this is the right path for Bumble's long-term value creation. I came to Bumble to innovate for our customers and help them find successful connections and relationships to our experiences. While we have a lot of work in front of us, I'm energized and confident in our path forward and will keep you informed on our progress along the way. I want to thank the Bumble team for their incredible hard work and dedication. And I want to thank our customers for their trust in us, as well as our partners and investors for their continued support. And with that, let me turn it to Anu.