Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Bumble Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. My name is Elliot, and I'll be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to hand over to Will Taveras, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us to discuss Bumble's Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results. With me today are Bumble's Founder and CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd; and CFO, Kevin Cook. 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 today's earnings press release and our periodic filings with the SEC. 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 the most comparable GAAP measures are available in our earnings press release, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website at ir.bumble.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Whitney.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Helping people find love has been Bumble's focus since day 1. What made Bumble successful from the start was simple but powerful. We built trust with women. That trust became our moat. It created a healthier, more balanced member base that drove engagement, retention, growth and a global brand. Historically, most dating products skewed male, leading to an uneven experience where women often felt overwhelmed and disengaged. Bumble changed that by putting women in control, creating trust, balance and a higher quality member base that produce better outcomes for everyone. Today, we have the brand long identified with putting women first and a deep understanding of what women want from love and connection. This brand identification is perhaps our biggest strategic asset. That's why we've returned to that core, winning with women because we believe that when women feel safe, respected and confident and when they meet quality matches, everything else improves. Connection becomes more meaningful, engagement more genuine and the business more sustainable. When I returned as CEO in March, the first thing we did was listen deeply and intentionally to women. What we heard across markets was consistent. People want to trust who they're meeting. They want better quality matches, and they want more authenticity. Those insights became the foundation of the quality over quantity reset I've been talking about over the past 2 quarters. Every step we have taken since our product updates, investments in AI and every marketing move ties back to one goal, making Bumble a better experience for women because when women are happy, the entire ecosystem thrives. That is the focus driving our transformation into the love company, expanding beyond dating to build the global platform for meaningful relationships, romantic and platonic. At its…

Thank you, Whitney, and good afternoon, everyone. In my first months at Bumble, I've been impressed by the strength of our brand, the capability of our teams and the clarity of our vision. As Whitney mentioned, our third quarter results reflect our quality-first prioritization and ongoing strategic reset. We remain focused on improving member experience, strengthening the foundation of the business and maintaining financial discipline. While some of these actions create near-term headwinds, they are designed to position Bumble for healthier growth and stronger monetization over time. Together with continued product innovation and market expansion, we believe this is the path to durable long-term revenue growth. I will focus my comments on our third quarter performance before sharing guidance for the fourth quarter. Our third quarter results came in ahead of our expectations, but also were heavily impacted by our transformational work. So I think it's useful to start with context on the status of this work and the related puts and takes into what we are reporting today as well as our outlook for Q4. First, with respect to revenue, during Q3, we launched our August product updates focused on trust and safety. As Whitney has explained, we are committed to improving member base quality, and we expected these updates to result in increased attrition of targeted member segments over the near-term. That attrition is reflected in our monthly active user counts with the associated reduction in paying users creating a headwind to revenue this quarter. Since the trust and safety rollout occurred relatively late in the third quarter, results for Q4 will reflect a comparatively larger full quarter impact, both from a paying user count and revenue perspective. The second factor is marketing. We discussed last quarter how we largely paused marketing spend and in particular, stopped most…

[Operator Instructions] First question comes from Nathan Feather with Morgan Stanley.

Two from me. First, Whitney, now that you've gotten back in the CEO seat and are really starting to make some real product changes, if we zoom forward 2, 3 years, what's your key vision for how Bumble will really work differently from today and be able to drive the successful outcomes? And then a little bit more short-term, but what visibility do you have into the timing and magnitude of when revenue growth might bottom and then hopefully start to improve, especially given the talk of potentially paying user growth bottoming in the first?

Thank you so much for the questions. I appreciate it. So let's start with the 2- to 3-year outlook. I think there's a slight misconception that exists with folks looking at the dating industry, thinking that it's the swipes that people are dissatisfied with or it's this or it's that functionality. But the reality is, and I just want to put this extremely bluntly, our product road map for the foreseeable future, for the years to come is solving for people's pain points, particularly women's pain points. And frankly, that is how we got here. That is truly what differentiated Bumble from any other dating product that had ever existed. If you think about it quite simply, you don't have a balanced member base or ecosystem or dynamic when we're talking about heteronormative dating if you don't have a place that women want to be. And frankly, that's what Bumble has been synonymous with for all of these years. So when we look to the future, I don't think it's all that complex that you have to reinvent the wheel. The wheel works. And frankly, the demand has not changed through our history. As human beings, we just want love. We want relationships. And frankly, we need it to survive. How we deliver that needs to be modern. It needs to be current, and it has to feel up to par with where people are today with what they expect from technology. So what's so exciting about right now, and I cannot overemphasize this. What AI gives us the ability to do? It gives us the ability to solve our members' pain points to hear women and say, "Oh, this is what you want from a dating product. Oh, you don't want this to ever happen to you again. Oh,…

Yes. Nathan, it's Kevin. Thanks, Whitney. So as you might expect, we're not forecasting revenue beyond Q4, but I can give you an idea of the arc, right? So just thinking about the Q3 decline in payers, for example, the decline was driven primarily by 2 intentional strategies designed to improve member base quality and, of course, member experience. You're familiar with some of these, but let me just repeat them for clarity. So trust and safety work and a reduction in our marketing spend together contributed approximately 80% of the decline in paying users on a year-over-year basis. So it's important to recognize that we control these reductions to a large extent, and that this strategy is all consistent with the reset that Whitney outlined. In terms of sort of progress in executing that strategy, just looking at some of the things that we know, and as Whitney highlighted already, it's extremely early. We've only been at it for about a quarter, but we are seeing some signs of encouragement. We saw a modest improvement, and you might have observed this in our prepared remarks, but we saw a modest improvement in retention, for example, over the quarter. We saw an 11% improvement in ARPPU in the quarter for Bumble. We, in addition, saw very strong uplift in brand awareness and brand perception among women in the quarter, mostly related to our brand campaign. And we are -- we continue to make progress on this internal framework you've heard us refer to before, the Beehive Fit framework, where we are attempting to lift to members from what we call internally the improved category into the approved category. And there, we are seeing all of the categories moving in the right direction. And so, that incremental progress, it's going to take time, of course, but that incremental progress is encouraging as well. Remember that the approved members show significantly higher engagement and they monetize at more than twice the rate of improved members. So apart from understanding, as Whitney was suggesting that the functioning of the ecosystem, it's essential to have high-quality members as proxy approved members, it also has an obvious impact on business performance. So I'll pause there, Will, and see whatever questions we have or Nathan's got a follow-up.

[Operator Instructions] We now turn to Andrew Marok with Raymond James.

Maybe digging into that last point that Kevin made there on the improved bucket. I know that was going to be a major initiative in kind of bringing along the improved members to ARPPU. And I understand it's probably a pretty wide spectrum, but is there anything specific that you're seeing out of those improved members that are giving you signs for encouragement or perhaps caution? Or anything else that you'd like to call out within those that you think would be important for us to look for as we go into 4Q and beyond?

Thanks for the question. So I'll take that. And if Kevin wants to add on, we'll do that after. So I think it's really important to understand that a lot of folks have the capability to be what we would call approved members in just a couple of tweaks. So I'll give you a quick example. You might have a great person who is looking for love, but they have no clue how to write a bio. They only have one photo. So while they could be going out on lots of dates and getting a lot of interaction, because they have limited knowledge on how to set up a dating app or how to show up at their best self, they actually get stuck in what we call this improved category. And so, what we're really seeing is the more profiles photos someone adds going through just a couple of these quick steps with the trust and the safety tooling that we've introduced, they get more matches. They get more right swipes, they get more engagement. An approved member has better outcomes. And as Kevin just stated, they have higher retention rates. They monetize much better. And frankly, it just improves that entire flywheel, and it really gives people more to operate with. And so, when we focus on improving the improved, not to be redundant there, there's huge opportunity here because the vast middle is somewhere stuck in the middle. And so, this is what we're focused on with this road map that we keep talking about. Building an exceptional product experience doesn't have to be some fancy flashy new feature. It's frankly, "Hey, how do we get onboarding tools in the hands of our members so that they can set up a remarkably robust and authentic and…

Great. Really helpful color. And then maybe one quick one for Kevin. I'm not sure if you've seen the proposed transaction or the -- excuse me, the proposed settlement details between Google and Epic today. But just wondering if you have an opinion on how that kind of contrasts with what you have assumed into your guidance for the cost of revenue line.

Okay. So no, I haven't seen the details. So I don't have any insight to share there. I can comment briefly on sort of our direct billing initiatives. As you might expect, we -- as soon as permitted, we set up alternative payments, and we've been testing those strategies throughout Q3, and we'll continue to do that in Q4. You saw in our cost of sales a meaningful improvement in Q3. And we would expect to continue to -- while we will refine strategies around alternative billing throughout Q4, we'd still expect that benefit to persist into Q4, and we should have a full quarter effect of cost of revenue benefits.

We now turn to Ygal Arounian with Citi.

I wanted to ask specifically about the stand-alone AI product, Whitney and sort of your thoughts and visions around that, but something that will sort of always be stand-alone. What's the sort of AI-first dating app experience like? And how does that impact how you view the core Bumble experience and how that overlaps with that vision and strategy?

Thanks for the question. So I think before I talk about our upcoming stand-alone AI product, I actually did want to speak about 2 things surrounding AI. So first and foremost, I'm sure you and everybody else tuning in have been reading a lot and hearing a lot about the new AI-focused dating apps. I really want to make an important point here. Throughout my career, I have seen hundreds of dating apps, dating products, dating matchmakers, you name it, hit the market and fizzle and fumble. There's a reason why there's only a couple of us that stand as strong as we do on a global level. And that's because building critical mass and building a trusted double-sided marketplace is incredibly difficult to do. So what really gives us a unique opportunity here and a right to win is, we have extraordinary data. We have unbelievable sets of groups of people around the world that are looking for love that are actively searching for dating and us being able to lean into this moment with AI and provide them a modern experience that doesn't collapse or change the current experience. So you've got to separate these in your mind. You've got Bumble Date today, and we're going to talk about how AI affects that in a moment. But the stand-alone product is something that, in my opinion, has never been done before. It is going to be very unique. I am extremely excited about it, and our team is very excited about it. The way it ultimately -- we can't disclose the details of how it will work. But what I will leave you with is, if dating apps have predominantly been discovery oriented, right? You get on and you kind of just discover people. This is really the…

It did and very helpful. And I guess maybe a little bit more near-term, just as you get through to the spring product release and you're talking about kind of the, I guess, steady releases through spring and solving pain points. Are there a few things that you see as being sort of the biggest drivers? I know we're doing all the cleanup work and enhancing the user experience on one side, but in terms of like new products that are coming out, are there a few things that are sort of excite you the most?

Yes, that's a great question. So this might be a slightly unpredicted response that the least exciting features on paper are actually the ones that move the needle the most for us sometimes. So when you go and invest time and energy and optimization, for example, into customer service, that has a meaningful impact on our members' lives. They are feeling heard. They're getting their problems resolved. Now, on paper, that's not some flashy new release. So what we're really focused on right now between the launch of 2.0, and I'm using that as a reference point. 2.0 is the new AI cloud-native tech stack that Bumble will live on in the future, which is the mid-'26 technology. But if you look at everything we're doing between now and then, it's just listening to our members, right? Our product road map is our customer pain points. And as I said, you don't ask members, "Hey, what's not working for you and they say, "Oh, wow, I really wish you had this flashy crazy feature." They just say, I want a better profile. I want to be able to see more information about someone. I want a safer experience. I want the algorithm to be more personalized to me. These are at face value, quite basic asks, but this is what builds an incredible experience. And frankly, this is what got us to being the great company we are. And yes, the technology has been innovating and iterating over time. And obviously, we have to evolve with where the category is. But ultimately, the strategy doesn't change. Just listen to women and give them what they want. It's very simple, and that's exactly what we're doing, and that's how we win with the category.

We have no further questions. So this concludes our Q&A and today's conference call. We'd like to thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.