Bumble has purchased community-building app Geneva to further expand into the friendship market as it moves away from a sole focus on romantic relationships. The company said that the deal is designed to help it expand its focus from “one-to-one connections to groups and communities,” marking another shift into the company becoming primarily a connection-based platform rather than just a dating-centric one. In this month’s Q1 earnings call, CEO Lidiane Jones noted that the company planned on considering Geneva’s “value add” to the company’s current goals.
She said: “There’s certainly a lot of interesting technology companies across the industry that we’re constantly looking at, but we immediately look at if it actually aligns and accelerates with our long-term mission here.” The ongoing decline in dating apps has led to weak earnings industry-wide, with Bumble being one of the casualties. To cut costs, the company laid off 30 percent of i ts workforce this year .
Although Bumble already has a separate friends app built around meeting locals, Geneva takes that concept to the next level by emphasizing community building not just connecting . Founded in 2019, Geneva’s mission is to bring like-minded people together in a given area to form a community, whether that be a book club or a hiking group. Since its inception, the company has raised $36m from investors including Coatue, Instagram founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, Sequoia’s Michael Moritz,.
