Bumble to test AI-powered dating experience

Bumble will soon test an AI dating experience called, simply, Dates.

Dates will be powered by Bee, a standalone product feature designed as a personal dating assistant and matchmaker, Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO, said during its Q4 2025 earnings call.

As Bumble told Mashable, users will start using Dates with an onboarding conversation to discuss values, relationship goals, communication style, lifestyle, and dating intentions. These conversations, which will be with “Bee,” will apparently be private and not shared on your profile. Users will also be able to control what elements of the conversation Bee uses to search for matches.

Then, Bee will identify a highly-compatible profile and notify both users with a description of why they’re a match. If the interest is mutual, the connection moves to a conversation.

“To fully recover and return to growth, we must focus on product and technology innovation, which is where our efforts are now,” Wolfe Herd said during Bumble‘s earnings call. Bumble’s total revenue and paying users had decreased year over year (14 percent and 21 percent, respectively) compared to Q4 2024.

Wolfe Herd said that since the start of this year, she’s been spending 90 percent of her days with the tech and product teams “reimagining what finding love looks like in the era of AI.”

“We are rearchitecting the entire Bumble experience from start to finish,” she said. Bumble can’t use its legacy tech stack (the set of technologies that together build an app), so it’s building a new, cloud-native tech stack with a targeted launch in Q2. Wolfe Herd said it’s not just a backend upgrade, but a fully new platform coming.

Wolfe Herd also acknowledged the burnout and disillusionment with dating apps as of late. “Daters across the industry are dissatisfied with being reduced to images and potentially dismissed with a swipe,” she said. “Bumble 2.0 introduces a chapter-based structure designed to help members tell their stories more authentically and understand one another more deeply.”

She said the AI prioritizes fewer, more relevant matches over volume, combats swipe fatigue, and helps members move towards real-world connections.

The beta of Dates is launching soon, and future iterations are expected to incorporate date suggestions and anonymous feedback. Bumble already launched some AI features, Profile Guidance and Photo Feedback, last month.

Back in 2024, Wolfe Herd discussed an AI-powered dating concierge that would basically date for you, so it’s unsurprising that the app is taking this direction.

Other major dating apps, particularly Tinder and Hinge, have also added AI features in the last few years. Tinder is also reportedly testing an AI matchmaker, while Hinge’s latest AI feature helps start better conversations. Hinge‘s founder, Justin McLeod, left the app last year to launch an AI dating service called Overtone.