The French social network BeReal, which operates on the exchange of photos taken at a random time each day, announced on June 27 that it would thank 28 employees. “Following the acquisition of BeReal, we learned two days ago that part of the team had been made redundant, mainly as part of a refocusing on talents based in France and Europe”, announced Romain Salzman, COO of the company, on LinkedIn. The latter published the names of all the employees concerned, previously working in engineering, iOS and Android development, on back-end functions, products, data, marketing and customer operations.
The start-up was bought on June 11 by the French mobile video game unicorn Voodoo for 500 million euros, a historic amount between two young French companies. Founded in 2020 by Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau, the application is based on the exchange of photos between friends. Users receive a notification at a random time each day, which allows them to instantly send their friends two photos (internal and external camera of the smartphone). The application stands out for the authenticity of the photos published, without filters, as opposed to the posed staging of Instagram.
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BeReal had enjoyed great success during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly in the United States, France and Japan. It claimed 40 million active users. But for some time now, its growth has stagnated, unable to stand up to industry behemoths like Instagram and Snapchat. The application did not generate any income, having chosen to operate without advertising or subscription. Alexandre Yazdi, CEO and co-founder of Voodoo, announced after the acquisition that he intended to transform BeReal into “major social network”notably by adding video formats. A way of relaunching itself to position itself as an alternative to the giant TikTok, which had 16 million French users in May.
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