Bumble has acquired Official, an app that’s meant to build stronger relationships for couples through mood check-ins and date planning.
It’s part of the company’s broader strategy to strengthen what it would consider the ecosystem of love, whether it’s friendships, budding relationships, or couples who have been together for years.
“We’re really trying to build the entire relationship journey and take care of the entire relationship from start to finish,” Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd tells Fast Company. Bumble declined to disclose the terms of the deal.
Since it launched in 2021, Official has grown to more than 368,000 couples and is available in 45 countries, Bumble said.
Herd pointed toward studies that have shown the growing loneliness epidemic threatening humans’ health and happiness.
“When you say something as simple as, the world is facing a loneliness crisis . . . and we are in a really toxic state as humans, I just feel like we have such an interesting business to try and heal some of that through better relationships,” she says.
Official will remain as a standalone app for the time being, though Herd says there are opportunities for Official and Bumble to collaborate. If a person finds a partner through Bumble, they can switch to the company’s relationship-centric app rather than leave the system entirely. Couples who met on another app or in person could also sign up for the app and join the Bumble network.
Growing out the ways Bumble can attract users could be a strong boost for investors. Shares of Bumble are down 77% since its public debut and down 17% year-to-date.
The company has also been working to deepen its involvement with artificial intelligence. “Our products are the rare exception of where AI just becomes a huge, huge tailwind,” Herd says. The eventual goal is to use AI to get people to spend less time glued to their phones by making the app more efficient and capable of predicting good connections.
“We want to get you in real life with safe, compatible people as quickly as possible, and AI will be a huge way to do that,” Herd says.
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