Here’s something to buzz about.
Dating app Bumble, founded by woman entrepreneur and former tech executive Whitney Wolfe Herd, is reportedly preparing an initial public offering for early next year. And anonymous sources told Bloomberg that the company could seek a valuation of at least $6 billion.
[Related: Serena Williams Revealed She’s Been Secretly Investing In Women for 5 Years]
In addition to joining several other high-profile apps and tech companies in the publicly traded world — think home travel site AirBnB and delivery service Doordash — Bumble would also become one of a very small number of woman-run public companies if it makes the move.
Only 3 percent of companies that went public from 1996 to 2013 had women CEOs, according to sociologist Martin Kenney and economist Donald Patton of the University of California, Davis. Research on the subject beyond that is scant, but we found just 22 public, woman-founded firms when we looked into it — out of just over 3,600 publicly traded companies in the U.S. overall.
[Related: 22 Public Companies Founded by Women]
That would make Bumble the 23rd woman-founded firm to trade on the public markets.
Herd, 31, also co-founded rival dating app Tinder, which she later sued for sexual harassment. She serves as Bumble’s CEO.