Dubsmash was a big craze in 2015 with its app for sharing lip-dub videos, but in 2016 its thunder has been well and truly stolen by Musical.ly. Earlier in the year, Dubsmash got a revamp with more emphasis on private sharing and messaging in order to compete, and now it has raised a new funding round of €9m ($9.6m) to continue its comeback. TechCrunch reported that the round was led by VC firm Sunstone Capital, with Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, Eniac Venture and Lowercase Capital all chipping in. The article also claims that Dubsmash recently laid off a fifth of its staff (note: that’s seven people) in the wake of co-founder Roland Grenke’s departure in June. “In an effort to streamline processes and scale our growth with this new capital, we restructured the organisation for growth,” is how Dubsmash’s spokesperson put it. “We believe that with this new structure, we scale our company to greater heights. Our organization currently has 27 employees and we’re currently hiring in engineering, product, content and more.” The Dubsmash app has now been downloaded 140m times, although the fact that Musical.ly is now claiming 160 million active users shows the scale of the competition.
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