Round this time final 12 months, Cameo hit a major low level. Its valuation dropped by a minimum of 90%, and the corporate’s dire monetary state of affairs meant it was unable to pay a $600,000 effective from the FTC.
Now, the corporate behind the celeb greeting app is exploring a brand new, albeit considerably uninteresting, avenue for progress. On Thursday, Cameo introduced the launch of Candl, a birthday planning app designed for forgetful customers who need to rejoice their associates’ birthdays with out being late to the celebration.
Candl, accessible to obtain without cost on the App Retailer, syncs birthdays out of your saved contacts and creates a birthday calendar, permitting you to see your pals’ and members of the family’ birthdays whereas receiving reminders for upcoming celebrations. For astrology followers, you too can see with whom you’re most appropriate based mostly in your zodiac signal.
Moreover, the app has a “Birthday Community,” so if one other Candl person has entry to the identical contact however doesn’t know their birthday, the app will share the birthday info it has out of your contacts. (Customers preferring to not share their birthday info can decide out by visiting candl.app/optout and submitting the telephone numbers they need to exclude.)
Candl can be planning so as to add an AI-powered function that implies reward concepts.
The app is fairly easy and may very well be useful for many individuals — in any case, everybody has birthdays, and many people have hassle preserving monitor of them. Nevertheless it’s form of unusual that this once-popular unicorn would select to create such a easy app to attempt to regain its fame.
Cameo is understood for extra bold tasks, resembling its NFT-based neighborhood providing and its pivot to content material creators. Nonetheless, regardless of these efforts, the corporate doesn’t appear to be seeing the outcomes it hoped for.
Information from app intelligence agency Appfigures signifies that downloads of the Cameo app have steadily declined since their peak throughout the pandemic. In 2021, Cameo noticed 1.1 million app installs in comparison with 433,000 in 2022. The primary half of this 12 months marked the primary enhance, at 270,000 downloads, representing a 24% rise in comparison with final 12 months’s 217,000.
Plus, within the first six months of 2025, international gross shopper spending within the app reached roughly $1.7 million, representing a 64% decline from round $4.7 million throughout the identical interval in 2024.
Time will reveal whether or not Candl succeeds or fails to achieve sufficient traction.
