Yesterday, Facebook announced that it is acquiring the startup tbh, an app that lets people anonymously answered kind-hearted questions about their friends in a poll.
In the past nine weeks, tbh has managed to score 5 million downloads and 2.5 million daily active users who vote on polls that ask positive questions like “Who is the best to bring to a party?” and “Who has the best smile?” with uploaded contacts as answer choices.
Since it officially launched in August, tbh has racked up 1 billion poll answers, mostly from teens and high school students. When profiled by TechCrunch last month, co-creator Nikita Bier told us, “If we’re improving the mental health of millions of teens, that’s a success to us.”
Sources claim that the price paid for the app was less than $100 million and that it won’t require any regulatory approval. As part of this deal, the app’s co-creators — Bier, Erik Hazzard, Kyle Zaragoza and Nicolas Ducdodon — will relocate to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters where they can continue to grow their app with Facebook’s cash, engineering, anti-spam, moderation and localization resources. They will now be official employees of Facebook, as opposed to more independently run Facebook-owned companies like Instagram and Whatsapp.
The tbh team announced:
“When we met with Facebook, we realized that we shared many of the same core values about connecting people through positive interactions. Most of all, we were compelled by the ways they could help us realize our vision and bring it to more people.”
