French mobile app developer Voodoo, the owner of Gen-Z social media app BeReal, has reported €623m in revenues for 2024 — a 20% growth from the previous year.
It marks another year of profitability for the company, with an EBITDA of €135m, 34% more than in 2023. Voodoo has been EBITDA-positive since 2017.
BeReal, which Voodoo acquired less than a year ago as a loss-making business with a declining user base, is now breaking even and has a stable number of users.
“We’re quite happy with the result,” says Voodoo CEO Alexandre Yazdi. “We’re still working on innovative functionalities to start growing [the user base] again instead of stagnating.”
Voodoo, which launched in Paris in 2013, develops games and apps for mobile. With backing from high-profile investors like Chinese media giant Tencent and Goldman Sachs, it’s now valued at €1.7bn, with a presence in more than 250 countries. Over half of its revenue comes from the US.
The company reported 950m downloads in 2024 and has 150m monthly active users.
Acquiring BeReal
Last June Voodoo bought BeReal, a photo-sharing app targeting Gen-Z users, for €500m in a cash and earnout deal. This means that part of the funding will be paid once the company has achieved pre-defined financial targets.
BeReal launched in 2020 and saw a quick rise in popularity before its success started waning at the end of 2022. Yazdi says that at the time of the acquisition, the app hadn’t started monetising its product yet; it was losing $3m (€2.6m) every month and its user base was declining.
“We couldn’t afford to keep this cash burn,” says Yazdi. “The first objective was not to earn money but to break even.”
Cost-cutting measures were taken, with reports that nearly 30 employees were let go. Voodoo also implemented “light monetisation” through advertising. Yazdi says that BeReal broke even after a few months, with revenues hitting $2m (€1.7m) per month on average over the last year.
Several functionalities were also added to the app, including video and chat.
Yazdi says that for the past two months BeReal’s user base has stopped declining to stabilise at 30m users monthly.
“We would have liked it to be faster and to be growing already,” says Yazdi. “But we can’t measure success in just a year.”
“We’ve managed to do this in a few months. If we give ourselves 2-3 years… we can start building a resilient and profitable business.”
A shifting strategy
Social media apps like BeReal are only a small part of Voodoo’s activities. The vast majority (90%) of the company’s revenue comes from mobile games.
It’s a competitive market with bigger players like US-based Zynga, which was acquired in 2022 by games developer Twenty-Two for $12.7bn (€11.2bn). Zynga had previously reported annual revenues of $2.8bn (€2.5bn) in 2021.
In 2024 Finnish mobile games developer Supercell, another leader in the space, reported 300m monthly active players and €2.8bn in revenues.
Yazdi says that to keep growing, Voodoo is diversifying its offer.
The company initially focused on what is known as ‘hyper-casual’ mobile games — which can be developed in weeks, often go viral and have a life span of around 1.5 years. But in 2019 Voodoo started investing in games called ‘hybrid-casual’, more in-depth products that require creation times of up to a year with life spans reaching 10-20 years. Hybrid-casual games typically generate revenue through advertising and in-app purchases.
Yazdi says that hybrid-casual games now drive Voodoo’s growth, representing 70% of revenues. The company plans to expand into even more complex ‘pure casual’ games, which Yazdi says could represent up to €1bn per game in revenues.
Long-term IPO
In addition to BeReal, Voodoo has completed around 20 acquisitions, says Yazdi — from Israeli gaming studio Beach Bum, which it bought for €300m in 2021, to smaller partner studios.
While M&A is not the company’s primary growth strategy, Yazdi says that Voodoo is keeping an eye out for acquisition opportunities.
It has also announced it has secured €175m in funding from a consortium of banks and institutional partners, which will mainly be used to refinance its existing debt.
But while the company is experiencing strong growth, a public listing is not on the cards for now.
“For a successful IPO, you need two elements: a certain size… and a resilient and predictable business,” says Yazdi. “We’ve worked hard on those two elements but I don’t think we are ready for an IPO at this stage.”
“We’re talking more about a five-year horizon for this.”
Update on 20 May 2025: This article has been corrected to reflect that Voodoo has been EBITDA-positive since 2017.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/voodoo-bereal-2024-results/
