- French gaming company Voodoo recently acquired social media app BeReal in a €500 million deal.
- BeReal previously raised around $90 million from heavyweights such as Coatue and Accel.
- Voodoo is now set to lay off a chunk of BeReal staffers, sources say.
French gaming company Voodoo is already cutting a chunk of BeReal staffers just weeks after acquiring the company in a deal worth 500 million euros, Business Insider has learned.
Leadership of Voodoo on Tuesday conducted an all-hands meeting with BeReal staffers, informing them of plans to layoff a significant portion of BeReal's workforce, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
The move comes about two weeks after Voodoo said it was acquiring BeReal in a deal comprised of stock and some cash and replacing its co-founder and CEO, Alexis Barreyat.
BI previously reported that BeReal was set to be acquired. The venture-backed start-up was set to run out of funding later this year and was having trouble garnering interest in a Series C.
A spokesman for Voodoo and BeReal declined to comment.
In a June interview with BI, Alexandre Yazdi, the CEO of Voodoo did not deny that BeReal would be hit with post-acquisition layoffs.
Instead, he said the company wanted to "keep all the good talent, the ones that are willing to work with us the way we want to work, the ones that are adapted to our culture and our strategy." Yazdi added that he intended to implement a "sustainable business model" as quickly as possible.
BeReal launched in 2020 and skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic, hailed as an "anti-Instagram" that prompted users once a day to take a picture of whatever they were doing within a two-minute window. Since then, the app has struggled to grow its user base, stalling around 25 million per day, according to internal figures, as BI reported previously.
The startup raised $90 million in funding from venture capital heavyweights such as DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, and Accel. At its peak in May 2022, it was valued at around $600 million.
