Whitney Wolfe Herd at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in 2018. Photo: TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Whitney Wolfe Herd built one of the best-known dating apps in the country, took its parent company public at 31, and in 2025 came back to run it. Her path, as recorded on her Wikipedia biography, runs from Salt Lake City to Austin, Texas, with a few turns in between.
Early years and Tinder
Wolfe Herd was born on July 1, 1989, in Salt Lake City, Utah. She attended Judge Memorial Catholic High School and later earned a bachelor’s degree in international studies from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. While still in her early twenties she helped start the Help Us Project, a nonprofit that sold bamboo tote bags to raise money for relief after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and she also launched a small clothing line.
In 2012 she joined the development team at Tinder, where she became vice president of marketing and is credited with naming the app. She left the company in April 2014.
Founding Bumble
After Tinder, Wolfe Herd first sketched out a women-only social network built around compliments, called Merci. That idea shifted when Andrey Andreev, the founder of the dating service Badoo, brought her in as a partner in his company, then known as MagicLab. The result was Bumble. She became its chief executive, held a 20 percent stake, and moved to Austin in December 2014.
In November 2019, Andreev sold a majority stake in the business to The Blackstone Group. Wolfe Herd held roughly 19 percent afterward and continued as CEO. The deal valued the company at about $3 billion, and the apps had around 75 million users at the time. In 2020, a new parent, Bumble Inc., took over from MagicLab as the owner of both Bumble and Badoo.
The 2021 public offering
Bumble listed on the Nasdaq in February 2021. At 31, Wolfe Herd became the youngest woman to take a U.S. company public, and the listing made her the world’s youngest female billionaire, according to Wikipedia. The BBC reported the company’s market value at its debut as topping $13 billion. Forbes had already included her on its 30 Under 30 lists in 2017 and 2018, and in 2022 it placed her 33rd on its ranking of America’s richest self-made women.
She has also taken part in policy work tied to her industry. In March 2019 she testified before the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee about unsolicited explicit photos sent to users of dating apps.
Stepping back, then returning
In November 2023, Bumble announced that Wolfe Herd would step down as chief executive. She moved into the role of executive chair in January 2024, and Lidiane Jones took over as CEO. In January 2025, the company announced that Jones was leaving for personal reasons and that Wolfe Herd would resume the chief executive job, effective in mid-March 2025. She owns about 23 million Bumble shares.
Away from the office, Wolfe Herd met her husband, Michael Herd, on a ski trip in Aspen, Colorado, in December 2013. The two married in 2017 in Positano, Italy. A film based on her life, Swiped, starring Lily James, was released in 2025.
Biographical details are drawn from Wikipedia’s entry on Whitney Wolfe Herd.
Rachel Lindqvist covers community life, the lakefront, dining and the arts for The Evanston Edge.
