Whitney Wolfe Herd has become the youngest self-made woman billionaire, aged 31. The entrepreneur founded dating and networking app, Bumble, enabling women to make the first move in both relationships and work.
Shares of Bumble rose 67 per cent in its trading debut to $72 at 1:03 pm in New York, yesterday, 11 February, valuing chief executive officer Wolfe Herd’s stake at $1.5 billion, reports Bloomberg.
“Hopefully this will not be a rare headline,” Wolfe Herd said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Hopefully this will be the norm. It’s the right thing to do, it’s a priority for us and it should be a priority for everyone else.”
Wolfe Herd’s career trajectory is well-documented. She started working in tech in 2012, specifically on the launch of Tinder, which she helped establish. She began dating the co-founder, Justin Mateen, but in 2014 they split and she lost her job. Wolfe Herd took Tinder to court for sexual harassment and discrimination (namely that she was allegedly stripped of her title of co-founder), but eventually the case was settled out of court. Later that year, she launched Bumble.
Today, the company also owns another dating app called Badoo. The two apps combined have 40 million active users, including more than 2.4 million paying customers.
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