Musical.ly acquired for $1 Billion (!!!) 🤑

Three years ago, Musical.ly didn’t exist. According to the Wall Street Journal the company was just acquired for $1 Billion. The official Musical.ly Twitter account retweeted Gary Vaynerchuk's tweet linking to the WSJ article, essentially confirming the acquisition. 💰👏

The acquirer is Bytedance, maker of the popular Chinese news app Toutiao, which recently raised money at a valuation of $20 billion. This is the same company that acquired Flipagram earlier this year.

Musical.ly has taken off with the teens and tweens, who use the app to make lip-syncing videos, and use Musical.ly's live streaming app, Live.ly, to hang out with friends virtually.

The Winners: The company's co-CEOs, employees, investors like Greylock and GGV, and @GaryVee – who has been loudly singing the company's praises for over a year.

The Losers: Facebook's M&A team will have a stern talking to for missing out on this.

Social is hard, and staying power is even harder to achieve. A billion dollar exit in three years is a wonderful achievement. Congrats to the founders of Musical.ly and the team. 🎉

P.S. Musical.ly cofounder and co-CEO Alex Zhu may have the best Product Hunt username there is. 😬

Watch out Yelp and Foursquare. Today Facebook launched a direct competitor to discover events, restaurants, and fun things in your city. It's called Facebook Local. 🗺

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