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Dating app Bumble continues to lose its footing. After subpar earnings, sluggish user growth, and internal stagnation, the company has laid off 30% of its staff. Meanwhile, its dating app competitor Grindr is soaring. Among dating apps, Match Groups propertiesmostly Hinge, sometimes Tinderlead the market. The duos ubiquity frame apps like Bumble and Grindr as boutique alternatives, designed for their innovative features or specialty user bases. Thats a difficult market to occupy, especially as dating app fatigue sets in and Gen Z seems to push for more in-person (and sexless) encounters. Those factors are just part of the reason why Bumble and its competitors are falling behind. But LGBTQ+ hookup app Grindr is flourishingposting solid growth in both user acquisition and revenue. In May, Grindr CEO George Arison spoke with Fast Company about his efforts to build a broader offering on the foundation of its core location-based grid of usersincluding some popular new features and a foray into telemedicine. He isn’t convinced that generational patterns entirely explain the struggles of dating apps. “This whole ‘Gen Z-avoiding-apps’ thing makes no logical sense. Gen Z loves TikTok and loves Reels and thinks you can read something online and youre an expert in it, but theyre not gonna do dating online?,” he says. “What I do think and what makes logical sense, is that if you dont build a product that Gen Zers want, theyre not going to use it. Thats where I think some of our peers have fallen flat.” His vision is still in progress, but here’s how the company’s constant efforts to test and scale new ideas could serve as a guide to its competitors. Comparing Bumble and Grindr Bumble and Grindr both went public in the early 2020s, when the dating app market was still hot thanks to the pandemics digital boom. Since their IPOs, both Bumble and Grindr have hit rough watersthough Grindr managed to right itself while Bumble continues to, well, bumble. Bumble’s stock opened at $43 per sharea height it hasnt reached since late 2021. In 2025, Bumble’s share price was hovering around $5 in early June, jumping above $6 only at the news of layoffs earlier this week. Meanwhile, Grindrwhich debuted at $16.90 in 2022, initially dropped to $5, but has been above $15 since November 2024 and exceeded $20 per share since mid-April. Revenue figures have told a similar story. Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to Bumble in March on the eve of some sour news: Bumbles Q1 earnings showed an 8% decrease in revenue year-over-year. For the same quarter, Grindrs revenue grew 25% over the prior year. Arison told Fast Company he sees the company’s performance as a reflection of the contributions that the LGBTQ+ communityhe is gay himselfcan make to the business world. “Part of our mission has to be we do super well as a business and we force everybody to change,” he says. Neither app releases consistent and specific user counts. Grindr appears to be growing its user base as Bumble’s gains are slow. In its Q1 earnings, Grindr reported more than 14.5 million monthly active users, up from more than 13.5 million the year prior. Bumbles earnings are split by paying users, a focus for former CEO Lidiane Jones. While the company grew its paying app users by 11% in 2024, it has since shed 100,000 of those subscribers in 2025. What should a dating app look like? Under Arison’s leadership, Grindr has turned into an innovation powerhouse. In his May interview, Arison emphasized the creation of Albumsbundles of photos sent via chats and not directly displayed on a profilewhich debuted in 2022. In 2024, Grindr users sent over two billion albums. He also pointed toward the apps new Right Now feature, which lets users search specifically for more immediate action. In D.C. and Sydney, two of the features trial markets, Arison said that 25 to 35% of our weekly active users were regularly going into the Right Now experience at least once a week. Grindr’s new features are available for all users, though paid subscribes receive additional uses. For example, free Grindr users get to post to the Right Now feed three times a week. Down the line, the company plans to make sessions available for purchase. That’s part of Arison’s strategy: Opening new features with limitations as a bridge to paid customer conversion. I dont want Grindr to end up like some of our competitors, who hollowed out their products focusing only on monetization and building nothing, Arison told Fast Company. “We are doing product-led processesits not just monetize, monetize, monetize. Were saying: Build new things, and those things will lead to revenue.” In contrast, Bumble has moved slowly with their feature rollouts. The Opening Moves feature debuted in 2024, allowing users to list prompts for new matches to respond to. The feature undercut Bumbles initial mission that women should message first. Since then, theyve also instituted ID verification and date-sharing safety features. Many of the app’s most compelling featureslike backtracking left swipes, Travel Mode, and Incognito Modeare only available to paid users. With dating app fatigue on the rise, both Bumble and Grindr have also expanded into alternate markets. Both have emphasized the role of friendship and platonic encounters on their apps, with Arison promoting Grindr’s ongoing effort to become the global gayborhood in your pocket,” noting “Our younger, 18-plus cohort wants to be in an environment where there are older pople as well. Friendships between younger and older people are much more common in our community.” Bumble launched its friend-focused Bumble B.F.F. in 2016, and broke it out into a stand-alone app, Bumble for Friends, in 2023. While Bumble for Friends doesn’t release stand-alone user numbers, its million-plus Google Play downloads is dwarfed by Bumble’s more than 50 million downloads. Grindr’s “gayborhood” model also flows easily with the original app; users have been employing Grindr for non-dating activities since its advent. By spinning their Friends function out into a separate app, Bumble must seek out an entirely separate user base. In this area, Grindr is making a similarly big bet on how it can show up in different ways for its users. The company recently launched Woodwork, a telemedicine company selling erectile dysfunction pills, in Illinois and Pennsylvania. Arison also predicted that Grindr would expand into haircare, skincare, and other things of that nature. When I started talking to shareholders, part of the conversation was: What do we want Grindr to be? Just a dating app or something more? Arison told Fast Company. Their view was very strong: We want to be a lot more.
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E-Commerce
Power plants and industrial facilities that emit carbon dioxide, the primary driver of global warming, are hopeful that Congress will keep tax credits for capturing the gas and storing it deep underground.The process, called carbon capture and sequestration, is seen by many as an important way to reduce pollution during a transition to renewable energy.But it faces criticism from some conservatives, who say it is expensive and unnecessary, and from environmentalists, who say it has consistently failed to capture as much pollution as promised and is simply a way for producers of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal to continue their use.Here’s a closer look: How does the process work? Carbon dioxide is a gas produced by burning of fossil fuels. It traps heat close to the ground when released to the atmosphere, where it persists for hundreds of years and raises global temperatures.Industries and power plants can install equipment to separate carbon dioxide from other gases before it leaves the smokestack. The carbon then is compressed and shippedusually through a pipelineto a location where it’s injected deep underground for long-term storage.Carbon also can be captured directly from the atmosphere using giant vacuums. Once captured, it is dissolved by chemicals or trapped by solid material.Lauren Read, a senior vice president at BKV Corp., which built a carbon capture facility in Texas, said the company injects carbon at high pressure, forcing it almost two miles below the surface and into geological formations that can hold it for thousands of years.The carbon can be stored in deep saline or basalt formations and unmineable coal seams. But about three-fourths of captured carbon dioxide is pumped back into oil fields to build up pressure that helps extract harder-to-reach reservesmeaning it’s not stored permanently, according to the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. How much carbon dioxide is captured? The most commonly used technology allows facilities to capture and store around 60% of their carbon dioxide emissions during the production process. Anything above that rate is much more difficult and expensive, according to the IEA.Some companies have forecast carbon capture rates of 90% or more, “in practice, that has never happened,” said Alexandra Shaykevich, research manager at the Environmental Integrity Project’s Oil & Gas Watch.That’s because it’s difficult to capture carbon dioxide from every point where it’s emitted, said Grant Hauber, a strategic adviser on energy and financial markets at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.Environmentalists also cite potential problems keeping it in the ground. For example, last year, agribusiness company Archer-Daniels-Midland discovered a leak about a mile underground at its Illinois carbon capture and storage site, prompting the state legislature this year to ban carbon sequestration above or below the Mahomet Aquifer, an important source of drinking water for about a million people.Carbon capture can be used to help reduce emissions from hard-to-abate industries like cement and steel, but many environmentalists contend it’s less helpful when it extends the use of coal, oil and gas.A 2021 study also found the carbon capture process emits significant amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that’s shorter-lived than carbon dioxide but traps over 80 times more heat. That happens through leaks when the gas is brought to the surface and transported to plants.About 45 carbon-capture facilities operated on a commercial scale last year, capturing a combined 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxidea tiny fraction of the 37.8 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector alone, according to the IEA.It’s an even smaller share of all greenhouse gas emissions, which amounted to 53 gigatonnes for 2023, according to the latest report from the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research.The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says one of the world’s largest carbon capture utilization and storage projects, ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek facility in Wyoming, captures only about half its carbon dioxide, and most of that is sold to oil and gas companies to pump back into oil fields. Future of US tax credits is unclear Even so, carbon capture is an important tool to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, particularly in heavy industries, said Sangeet Nepal, a technology specialist at the Carbon Capture Coalition.“It’s not a substitution for renewables . . . it’s just a complementary technology,” Nepal said. “It’s one piece of a puzzle in this broad fight against the climate change.”Experts say many projects, including proposed ammonia and hydrogen plants on the U.S. Gulf Coast, likely won’t be built without the tax credits, which Carbon Capture Coalition Executive Director Jessie Stolark says already have driven significant investment and are crucial U.S. global competitiveness.They remain in the Senate Finance Committee’s draft reconciliation bill, after another version passed the House, though the Carbon Capture Coalition said inflation has already slashed their value and could limit projects. Associated Press reporter Jack Brook in New Orleans contributed to this report. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Tammy Webber, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Rite Aid has selected a successful bidder for its Thrifty Payless subsidiary, which includes the beloved Thrifty ice cream brand, according to a bankruptcy court filing on Thursday. The buyer was identified as Hilrod Holdings, a limited partnership linked to Hilton Schlosberg and Rodney Sacks, top executives at the energy drink company Monster Beverage Corporation. Hilrod is seeking to pay $19.2 million for Thrifty’s assets, the filing revealed. The partnership is mostly known for its real estate investments Thrifty ice cream is available at scoop counters located inside many Rite Aid locations in addition to being sold by third-party retailers. It was not immediately clear what Hilrod plans to do with Thrifty should the sale be approved by the court. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for June 30. Fast Company reached out to a lawyer for Hilrod Holdings, and representatives for Monster Beverage and Rite Aid for comment. We will update this story if we hear back. Schlosberg and Sacks had until recently been co-CEOs of Monster Beverage. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revealed that Sacks planned to retire this month, while Schlosberg would continue to lead the company. Thrifty Ice Cream caught up in Rite Aid’s bankruptcy The fate of Thrifty ice cream has been uncertain since Rite Aid announced in early May that it would see Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for a second time. The embattled pharmacy chain is winding down its operations, closing or selling its physical stores, and has sold off most of its prescription files to competitors, including CVS and Walgreens. The Thrifty brand stretches back decades in Los Angeles, where it was sold at soda fountain counters inside the Thrifty Drug Store chain. It became part of Rite Aid through Rite Aid’s purchase of Thrifty Payless in 1996. This story is developing and could be updated.
Category:
E-Commerce
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