Bumble buys community building app Geneva to further develop friendships

Dating app maker Bumble has acquired Geneva, an online platform built around forming real-world groups and clubs. The company said the deal is designed to help it expand beyond “individual connections to groups and communities” — friendships, in other words.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the announcement comes shortly after Bumble revealed it would pursue acquisitions to drive growth, CEO Lidiane Jones (who joined Bumble from Slack the last year) noting on a recent earnings call that the company would consider the “value add” of an acquisition and how it might align with its own business goals.

“There are certainly a lot of interesting technology companies in the industry that we’re constantly looking at, but we’re immediately checking to see if they actually align and accelerate with our long-term mission here,” Jones said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call this month. .

So far, Bumble has flirted sparingly with mergers and acquisitions, snapping up French dating app Fruitz two years ago and then last year doling out $10 million for Official, an app for couples.

Friends will be friends

Although Bumble is best known for its dating app, the company recently indicated that friendships may become a priority for the company, in part because of a broader decline in dating apps that led Bumble to lay off 30 % of its workforce this year. due to low profits. Bumble already has a separate friends app designed for meeting people locally, and Geneva builds on that concept.

Founded in New York in 2019, Geneva aims to meet like-minded people in a given field, whether that’s forming running clubs or meeting up to talk about the latest books. The company had raised about $36 million from notable backers, including Coatue; Instagram founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom; Michael Moritz of Sequoia; and Patreon co-founder Jack Conte.

In a LinkedIn post this morning, Jones said the plan moving forward would be to “accelerate our friendship product using Geneva’s powerful technology platform.” It appears that Geneva will eventually be integrated into Bumble, with Geneva ceasing to operate as a standalone platform, but upon request from TechCrunch, the company has not confirmed what will happen next. In another message, Geneva said it would continue to support “your existing groups” and would temporarily make Geneva invitation-only during the transition. But it is unclear what will happen to Geneva once the acquisition is finalized, scheduled for the third quarter of 2024.