Bumble users, revenue fall as app overhaul aims to revive growth

Bumble’s latest quarter showed a company making more money from fewer users, a sign that the dating-app model may be running into a harder limit than management wants to admit. Total paying users fell 21.1% to 3.166 million in the first quarter of 2026 from 4.015 million a year earlier, while revenue dropped 14.1% to $212.4 million, even as average revenue per paying user rose 8.9% to $22.04.

The gains on monetization were not enough to offset the drop in scale. Bumble app revenue fell 14.4% to $172.7 million, and Badoo app and other revenue slipped 12.4% to $39.7 million. Net earnings rose 165.4% to $52.6 million, helped by lower sales and marketing spending, and adjusted EBITDA increased 28.3% to $82.6 million. The company also generated $77 million in operating cash flow and $74 million in free cash flow.

Whitney Wolfe Herd framed the slump as part of an intentional reset, saying Bumble had made a deliberate choice to prioritize quality over quantity. That is the core question now facing the company and much of the sector: whether dating apps are suffering from execution problems that a product overhaul can fix, or whether users are simply tiring of the swipe-first model that has dominated online dating for years.

Bumble is leaning hard toward the first explanation. The company said it is preparing a broad overhaul of its product and technology stack, including a cloud-native, AI-enabled platform intended to improve matching and speed up updates. The first stage of the new platform should begin rolling out in the coming weeks, and the fully reimagined Bumble experience is slated for a fourth-quarter launch, with phased global expansion to follow. Bumble also said its AI feature Bee is being tested in onboarding and interaction tools, with early engagement described as encouraging.

The company is trying to prove that infrastructure and interface changes can improve compatibility rather than simply chase more swipes. That effort comes as younger users, especially Gen Z, increasingly drift away from dating apps that can feel repetitive and low-yield. Bumble said groups on Bumble BFF nearly doubled in joins between December and March, driven by Gen Z women, and that 80% of BFF members are women. The relaunch of Bumble For Friends as BFF in the United States in September 2025 is one sign the company is trying to broaden beyond conventional dating.

Bumble ended the quarter with $246 million in cash and cash equivalents, or a pro forma cash balance of $150 million after refinancing and paying down $114 million of debt. It forecast second-quarter revenue of $205 million to $213 million and adjusted EBITDA of $65 million to $70 million. The numbers leave Bumble with enough financial room to keep rebuilding, but the bigger test is whether the overhaul can revive growth in a market that may already be losing patience with the old swipe economy.