Beme

When Casey Neistat and engineer Matt Hackett incorporated Beme in 2014 they set out to solve a cultural problem more than a technical one: social media, they argued, rewarded edited, performative selves. Beme’s thesis was simple and deliberately restrictive — short (initially 2–4 second) unpreviewable videos captured by covering a phone’s proximity sensor, uploaded instantly and served raw to followers. The first public version of the iOS app shipped on July 17, 2015. ([en.wikipedia.org](^[1]))

That origin story was classic creator-led entrepreneurship: Neistat brought an unmistakable editorial voice and a built-in audience; Hackett brought product and engineering credibility (formerly VP of engineering at Tumblr). The pair framed Beme as a cultural corrective — a way to demand honesty from image-driven platforms — and they leaned into Neistat’s fame to get attention, installs and press coverage almost immediately after launch. Within a matter of days the product produced headline metrics — early reports put week-one engagement in the millions of clips and reactions. ([en.wikipedia.org](^[2]), [techcrunch.com](^[3]))

Beme’s team and capital posture reflected a small startup with outsized ambitions. By May 2016 Neistat was publicly discussing the company’s finances at Disrupt New York: the leadership had raised what Neistat described as several million dollars to date, operated with a roughly $150k–$200k monthly burn and ran a compact, engineering-heavy headcount (about a dozen employees by multiple accounts). Public investor records and later private-data profiles list seed investors including Lightspeed Management, BoxGroup and Vayner/RSE, with aggregate funding reported in public datasets between roughly $2.6M and $6M — a discrepancy that later press noted when reconstructing the deal. ([techcrunch.com](^[3]), [ycombinator.com](^[4]), [pitchbook.com](^[5]))

The product was a study in design constraints: no preview, short duration, and a recording gesture that encouraged living through the camera rather than behind it. That singularity of purpose won Beme evangelists and press — outlets from The New York Times to Wired and BuzzFeed wrote admiringly about its attempt to engineer 'authenticity' — but the constraint also limited virality and repeated-use behaviors that modern social platforms depend upon (filters, editing features, discoverable trending content, advertising hooks). The team experimented with adjacent products — notably Exit Poll, launched in November 2016 to aggregate voter-recorded short videos during the U.S. election — signaling a pivot toward episodic and editorial formats rather than pure social networking. ([en.wikipedia.org](^[2]), [techcrunch.com](^[6]))

The critical strategic inflection came in late 2016. On November 28, 2016, CNN announced it had acquired Beme and would back the founders in building a new brand aimed at younger audiences; the transaction was widely reported as being worth approximately $25 million. Under the deal Neistat was to serve as an executive producer and the small Beme team was slated to join CNN, while the original consumer app would be sunsetted (the iOS/Android app was taken down on January 31, 2017). For legacy media, the acquisition was shorthand for 'buy talent and playbook' — for the founders it was a lifeline and a new kind of runway. ([techcrunch.com](^[3]), [theverge.com](^[7]), [en.wikipedia.org](^[2]))

But the marriage between creator-driven startup and a 24/7 news conglomerate revealed the classic cultural mismatch. Inside accounts from the founders, contemporaneous reporting and later retrospectives described a company that had already wrestled with product-market fit and cash runway; at CNN the Beme team experimented with multiple prototypes — including a live-news product called Wire and editorial experiments under the 'Beme News' label — but struggled to translate agility into sustainable scale inside the corporate structure. In January 2018 Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett publicly announced they were departing and Beme as a standalone company was folded into CNN Digital Studios; CNN said the brand and some products would live on in other parts of the company. ([medium.com](^[8]), [buzzfeednews.com](^[9]), [theverge.com](^[7]))

The Beme arc is instructive because it was neither a conventional startup success nor a simple creator endorsement deal. It delivered several unambiguous wins — fast initial user engagement, attention from top-tier investors and press, a high-profile exit that reportedly returned capital — but it also revealed the limits of creator influence in building category-defining infrastructure. Beme’s product choices constrained monetization pathways; the early engineering-heavy team and product-first mentality collided with CNN’s need for reproducible, advertiser-friendly content and predictable audience metrics. Those tensions help explain why the standalone company did not survive long after acquisition. ([en.wikipedia.org](^[2]), [techcrunch.com](^[3]))

For other celebrity entrepreneurs the Beme story is a compact case study: fame buys you distribution, not product-market fit. Neistat’s name and YouTube reach got downloads and a seat at the table with legacy partners, but sustaining a platform required repeat engagement, network effects and revenue models the original product did not deliver. The decision to sell — and the $25 million headline number — shows a pragmatic option available to creators: exit early with upside rather than grind toward an uncertain monetization path. At the same time, the post-acquisition experience is a cautionary tale about cultural integration and the urgent need for governance and metrics alignment when creative founders partner with corporate acquirers. ([techcrunch.com](^[3]), [medium.com](^[8]))

Today Beme lives mostly as a chapter in startup-and-media lore: product experiments such as Exit Poll and prototypes like Wire were folded into larger digital operations inside CNN, the public app was shuttered January 31, 2017, and by January 25, 2018 the founders left and the Beme entity was absorbed into CNN Digital Studios. The headline numbers — founding in 2014, app launch July 17, 2015, Android release May 2, 2016, acquisition in November 2016 for a reported $25 million, shutdown of the app January 31, 2017, and the founders’ departure January 25, 2018 — form a tight timeline that underscores how quickly a creator-led product can move from concept to major corporate exit and, ultimately, to dissolution. ([en.wikipedia.org](^[1]), [techcrunch.com](^[6]))

• 2014: Beme Inc. founded by Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett in New York City with the stated mission of 'bringing honesty back to social video.' ([en.wikipedia.org](^[1]))
• July 17, 2015: Public launch of the Beme iOS app. Early engagement exploded: within days the product logged millions of short clips and reactions in some reports. ([en.wikipedia.org](^[2]), [techcrunch.com](^[3]))
• May 2, 2016: Official Android release (version 1.0.0) as Beme attempted to broaden reach beyond iOS. ([en.wikipedia.org](^[2]))
• November 7, 2016: Product experiment 'Exit Poll' launched to collect voter-recorded short videos for Election Day coverage — a signal Beme was moving toward editorial, not only social, products. ([techcrunch.com](^[4]))
• November 28, 2016: CNN announces acquisition of Beme; news outlets report the deal as being valued at roughly $25 million and that the original consumer app would be shuttered ahead of a new CNN-backed brand. ([techcrunch.com](^[3]), [theverge.com](^[5]))
• January 31, 2017: The Beme app is removed from the iOS App Store and Google Play Store; CNN and the Beme team shift focus to digital news experiments. ([en.wikipedia.org](^[2]))
• January 25, 2018: Casey Neistat and Matt Hackett announce they are leaving Beme/CNN; Beme is folded into CNN Digital Studios and the standalone company ends. ([medium.com](^[6]), [buzzfeednews.com](^[7]))