Whitney Wolfe Herd, who was born on July 1, 1989, in Salt Lake City, Utah, is one of the most important people in modern tech entrepreneurship. She changed the online dating business as the founder and CEO of Bumble, the dating app that made women make the first move. She also fought for women’s rights in digital spaces. Wolfe Herd’s story is one of strength, creativity, and turning problems into successes. She co-founded Tinder and built a multi-billion-dollar empire. When Bumble went public in 2021, she became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at the age of 31. As of 2025, she is still in charge of the company and is dealing with new challenges in the competitive world of dating apps.
The first steps in business and early life
Whitney went to Judge Memorial Catholic High School and then got a degree in International Studies from Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. She was raised in a Jewish family by real estate developer Michael Wolfe and homemaker Kelly Wolfe. Her business sense was clear even when she was a student. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, she teamed up with celebrity stylist Patrick Aufdenkamp to start the “Help Us Get Cleaned Up” project, which sold bamboo tote bags to raise money for cleanup efforts. When celebrities like Nicole Richie carried the bags, the project gained popularity. This was an early sign of her talent for marketing and making a difference in the world.
Wolfe Herd moved to Los Angeles after she graduated. There, she met the people who would later make Tinder over dinner.
The Tinder Era: Rise and Controversial Exit
Wolfe Herd joined the incubator Hatch Labs in 2012 when she was 22 years old. She then helped start Tinder, which was originally called Matchbox. People say she came up with the name “Tinder” because of the app’s flame logo and the idea of making connections. As the Vice President of Marketing, she was a key part of the app’s rapid growth, focusing on college campuses and making it a cultural phenomenon.
But her time at Tinder came to an end in 2014 when executives, including her ex-boyfriend and Tinder CMO Justin Mateen, accused her of sexual harassment and discrimination. Wolfe Herd sued, and the case was settled out of court for a reported seven-figure sum with no admission of wrongdoing. The experience, which included online harassment and being watched in public, had a big impact on her. “I was flooded with hate online… really painful things,” she said later. Instead of giving up, she used the trauma to make a safer, more respectful option.
Starting Bumble: Women Take the Lead
Wolfe Herd started Bumble in late 2014 with help from the Badoo team and Badoo founder Andrey Andreev. The app’s main new feature was that only women could start conversations in heterosexual matches. This changed the way people dated and cut down on unwanted messages. “I wanted to make a place where women felt strong and in charge,” she said.
Bumble quickly grew, adding Bumble BFF (for friendships) and Bumble Bizz (for professional networking) to its dating service. After a deal with Blackstone in 2019, Bumble’s parent company was worth $3 billion. Andreev left, and Wolfe Herd became CEO with a lot of ownership.
The best part was in February 2021, when Bumble went public on Nasdaq with a valuation of more than $13 billion. Wolfe Herd made history as the youngest woman to take a U.S. company public. She was also briefly the youngest self-made female billionaire.
Problems, Taking a Break, and a Big Comeback
People looked closely at success. Bumble had a lot of competition from Tinder and Hinge. Wolfe Herd’s net worth dropped from over $1 billion to estimates of $400–500 million by mid-2025 because the stock market was so volatile. In late 2023, she stepped down as CEO because she was burned out and wanted to spend more time with her family. She became Executive Chair and chose Lidiane Jones (who used to work for Slack) as her successor.
But by early 2025, Bumble was having trouble with falling revenue and user growth. Jones quit in January for personal reasons, and Wolfe Herd said she would be back as CEO in March. “Bumble needs me back… watching it fall from its peak has been very hard,” she told The New York Times. Her return came at the same time as bigger changes in the industry, such as talks about AI in dating and features that promote self-love.
Life and Legacy
In 2017, Wolfe Herd married Texas oil heir Michael Herd in a big ceremony in Positano, Italy. The couple met on a ski trip to Aspen in 2013, where she famously teased him for not skiing. They have two sons (born in 2019 and 2022) and were expecting a third in 2025. They live in Austin, Texas.
The Hulu/Disney+ biopic Swiped, which came out in 2025 and starred Lily James as Wolfe Herd, brought her story into pop culture. She didn’t want to be involved at first and wanted to stop production, but later she admitted that it showed how hard it was for her to work in a male-dominated tech world.
Wolfe Herd has been on the TIME 100 list, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list twice, and the lists of America’s richest self-made women. She fights against online harassment, is a board member at Imagine Entertainment, and is a role model for women in tech.
Whitney Wolfe Herd is still a force at 36. She shows that one bold idea, born from hardship, can change millions of lives and change an industry. As dating apps change with AI and new social norms, her vision of kindness, equality, and empowerment keeps swiping right on the future.
