Photo-sharing platform BeReal has been acquired by video game and app developer Voodoo for €500 million. The acquisition comes as the French government steps up its technology ambitions.
Voodoo plans to introduce paid advertising on BeReal to push the company toward profitability, its CEO Alexandre Yazdi told the Financial Times, adding that it wants to expand the company’s active user base.
The acquisition was advised by JPMorgan and is the largest in Voodoo’s history. Aymeric Roffé, head of Voodoo’s own social media app Wizz, will become CEO of BeReal, while Alexis Barreyat, who founded the platform in 2019 at the age of 26, will remain “actively involved”.
Jean de la Rochebrochard, a member of BeReal’s board of directors and partner at Kima Ventures, an investment company co-founded by French billionaire Xavier Niel, called the sale a “wise decision,” especially as large financing rounds have become rarer as investors focus on the high-profile artificial intelligence sector.
BeReal promotes authenticity on its platform, as opposed to the filters and editing common on rivals like Snapchat and Instagram. However, the Paris-based tech company has stagnated in terms of user growth since 2022, when its popularity among teens and young adults soared.
The acquisition came on the same day that one-year-old French startup Mistral AI raised €600 million and is now valued at nearly €6 billion. The company aims to transform itself from a national champion to a competitor on the global tech stage. This deal was the largest yet for a startup outside of Silicon Valley that develops large, general-purpose AI models.
BeReal has been funded by venture capital in the past and raised a total of $90 million, according to data provider Crunchbase.
According to data from market research firm Sensor Tower, BeReal’s monthly active users have remained stable at around 50 million since the end of 2022. However, downloads fell from a peak of around 35 million in the third quarter of 2022 to 5 million in the three months to March this year.
“We believe that advertising is necessary for the business model of a social media platform,” Yazdi said. He stressed that ads would be integrated in an “extremely fluid” format so as not to “compromise the user experience.”
Rival platform Instagram, which is owned by Meta, introduced paid advertising in 2013, three years after its launch.
BeReal users are notified once a day to take a snapshot using their phone’s front and back cameras. They can unlock additional “posts” by uploading their images within an allotted two-minute window immediately after the notification.
Users can only see other people’s pictures after sharing their own, which Yazdi says makes BeReal an “unusual” social network in which all users are actively involved.
Although growth has slowed significantly, Yazdi said the majority of BeReal users still log in at least six days a week, presenting an “impressive” prospect for expansion and monetization.
The BeReal team has “focused its efforts on growing and developing a global user base” but now needs to find a “balance between monetization and product development,” he added.
BeReal’s user base, mainly young people from Generation Z, is concentrated in the US, France and Japan. Yazdi acknowledged that growth has slowed in the US in particular and said he would focus on “regaining trust in existing markets” and expanding into other parts of Europe and Asia.
The push toward an advertising-based business model comes after the company explored the idea of a subscription model at the height of its popularity, but experts say that would be difficult to implement, especially for platforms that target users with lower disposable income.