All of those totally disposable BeReal photos you took at work over the last few years were apparently worth a lot of money to someone.
The self-titled “Gen Z social network” was acquired for €500 million (or roughly in the neighborhood of $541 million), per a Monday press release from its new parent company Voodoo. While Voodoo is primarily a publisher of mobile games, it also has a portfolio of apps like Wemoms, a social network for mothers. After this acquisition, BeReal is the most noteworthy name of the bunch.
As part of this deal, BeReal CEO and co-founder Alexis Barreyat will oversee the transition to new management before leaving the company. It’s unclear if there will be any layoffs as a result of this purchase.
For those of us who are out of touch with the youth, BeReal blew up over the last few years due to its simple nature: Once a day, users are notified to take and post a photo of whatever they’re doing at that moment, within a two minute window. It’s changed somewhat over time (you can now post more than once per day, for starters), but the simple initial premise built up a userbase that Voodoo claims is north of 40 million active users.
Despite that success, this acquisition isn’t a big surprise. Its popularity was noticeably waning as early as a year and a half ago, and recent reports indicated BeReal was less than a year away from running out of cash entirely without some kind of lifeline.
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