• Poparazzi, once dubbed the anti-selfie social-media platform, shut down earlier this year.
• The app was briefly No. 1 on the US Apple App Store charts in 2021 and raised a $15 million Series A .
• Now, several members of its team have been hired by Meta.

The core team behind the once-viral social-media app Poparazzi has been hired by Meta.

Poparazzi, an anti-selfie photo-sharing app that encouraged users to snap pictures of their friends, skyrocketed briefly to the top of Apple's US App Store after launching in 2021. It shut down earlier this year.

Now, four Poparazzi staffers, including its engineers and CEO Alex Ma, are employees of Meta, Insider has learned. Meta has not acquired Poparazzi's assets, however, according to a person familiar with the matter. Further details of any deal are unknown to Insider at this time. 

The app, cofounded by brothers Alex and Austen Ma, became a venture capital darling, raising a $15 million Series A led by Benchmark. The startup was valued at $120 million in 2021, per Pitchbook data. 

Along with apps like BeReal and Locket, Poparazzi gained momentum among users as an alternative to Instagram. In 2022, the company shared that it had surpassed 5 million downloads, TechCrunch reported.

Prior to launching Poparazzi, the Ma brothers cofounded TTYL, an audio social network in 2018 — years ahead of Clubhouse and the myriad audio apps that hit the market following its success. TTYL had separately raised a $2 million seed round.

But two years after Poparazzi's splashy launch, the company shared on April 28 that it would be shutting down its app in an announcement published to Medium. While the app had amassed 1.1 million monthly active users (MAUs) in 2021, that number dwindled to about 3,000, according to data from Sensor Tower.

"Our journey to Poparazzi started 4 years ago with a simple goal: to connect people authentically," Alex Ma wrote in the Medium post. "We were inspired to build something different that would counter-balance the growing anxieties around social media. What began as a weekend hustle turned into something much bigger that we ever could have imagined. Along the way, millions of people joined us in building a more authentic, honest online community — one that lightened up the pressures of social media and celebrated our friendships."

It is not clear yet what projects the Poparazzi team has been assigned to within the Meta family of apps, but with the team's experience understanding young users, photo-sharing, and audio social networks, it is surely a strategic move on Meta's end – especially as Meta's and Instagram's gears shift toward building Threads into a hot app with staying power.

Several of Poparazzi's staffers held previous positions at Instagram and Facebook, as well.

Watch:

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufonyusdOaZKKmo6muqL7ApmShoaKawG6vzqucZqyVlrpurtSzsbJlo6Swqq3LZqSenJmWeqK8z2anqKiRp667xshmaWlqY2KE