Whitney Wolfe Herd

Whitney Wolfe Herd (born July 1, 1989) is an American entrepreneur most notable as the founder, executive chair, and CEO of Bumble. She is a co-founder of Tinder and was previously its Vice President of Marketing.

Wolfe became the world's youngest female billionaire when she took Bumble public in 2021; she was also the youngest woman to take a company public in the United States, at age 31.

Whitney Wolfe was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Kelly and Michael Wolfe.

Wolfe attended Judge Memorial Catholic High School. For college, she attended Southern Methodist University, where she majored in international studies and was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority.

While in college at the age of 20, she partnered with celebrity stylist Patrick Aufdenkamp to launch a non-profit organization, the Help Us Project, which sold bamboo tote bags to benefit areas affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The bags received national attention after celebrities, including Rachel Zoe and Nicole Richie, were photographed with them. Soon after, she launched a second venture with Aufdenkamp — a clothing line named Tender Heart.

After graduating, Wolfe Herd worked with orphanages in Southeast Asia.

In 2012, at age 22, Wolfe joined Cardify, a startup led by Sean Rad at the Hatch Labs business incubator. The project was later abandoned, but Wolfe joined the development team of Tinder (initially called MatchBox) with Rad and Christopher Gulczynski.

Before the app's launch, Wolfe was named vice president of marketing for Tinder. She reportedly came up with the name of the app, taking inspiration from the flame logo and the idea of tinder – easily combustible material used to start a fire. She has also been credited with fueling the app's initial popularity on college campuses and growing its user base.

Wolfe resigned from Tinder in April 2014. In September of that year, she received a more than $1 million settlement from her lawsuit against the company for sexual discrimination and sexual harassment after dating a Tinder co-founder who became "verbally controlling and abusive".

After leaving Tinder, Wolfe started sketching out a female-only social network centered around compliments, which she then called Merci.

Badoo founder Andrey Andreev encouraged her to start a new dating app and brought her on as a partner in his company, MagicLab, later renamed Bumble Inc. Andreev retained 79% ownership in the company for an investment of $10 million, along with additional investments, consulting services, and use of Badoo's infrastructure; Wolfe served as CEO and received a 20% ownership stake. In December 2014, Wolfe moved to Austin, Texas to continue work on the app.

In December 2013, she met oil and gas heir Michael Herd on a skiing trip in Aspen, Colorado. They married in 2017 in Positano, Italy. They have two sons, born in 2019 and 2022. The family lives in Austin, Texas.

The 2025 film Swiped is based on Wolfe Herd’s life and stars Lily James.