(Reuters) -Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd will step down as chief executive of the dating app operator and hand over the role to seasoned tech and business executive Lidiane Jones, sending its shares down 7% in premarket trading.
Jones is the CEO of Salesforce-owned Slack and has held senior business roles at Microsoft where she spent more than 12 years.
She will takeover on Jan. 2, while Wolfe Herd will remain as executive chair.
Wolfe Herd, 33, launched the company in 2014 after an acrimonious departure from Match Group-owned rival app Tinder, which she had co-founded. Bumble’s eponymous app stood out in the industry by allowing women to make the first move.
In the recent years, Bumble, which counts Friends, Badoo, Fruitz (for Gen Z) and Official in its portfolio of dating services, has faced pressure to grow due to unrest in some markets like the Eastern Europe and competition from larger rival Match.
This the second big executive departure this year at the dating app company after President Tariq Shaukat stepped down after three years in the role.
Bumble is scheduled to report its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel and Arun Koyyur)
