MrBeast buys Vouch, the "LinkedIn for creators"

MrBeast just bought a major jobs platform that creators use to fill niche content and marketing roles.

It's called Vouch, and it connects creators with thumbnail designers, content strategists, and other specialist candidates. According to Business Insider, Vouch, which claims to have matched more than 35,000 candidates with jobs, has ambitions of becoming a "LinkedIn for creators."

Or at least it did.

Vouch goes offline

The platform has now been taken offline and replaced with a message from CEO Marty Pesis and an animation of a MrBeast-branded UFO beaming up the Vouch logo:

The message is hosted on mrbeastjobs.com/vouch, to which www.vouch.app now redirects. An inquiry link takes users to a standard MrBeast Jobs query form.

According to the press release about the acquisition, the mega-influencer will make Vouch available to the public again, but only after dogfooding it at his own company:

“MrBeast plans to use Vouch to supercharge internal hiring efforts before continuing to scale it externally.”

MrBeast's head of talent, Kara McCloud, said the acquisition will improve her company's hiring experience.

“Adding Vouch to the mix allows us to further support the team and enhance the hiring process in a way the industry has never seen. We couldn’t have done that without the software developed by Vouch!”

We reached out to MrBeast's Jobs team for more details on its plans for Vouch, but haven't heard back yet. Neither Pesis nor MrBeast's team has stated how much MrBeast paid for the firm.

What's next for CEO Marty Pesis?

In an X post, Marty Pesis said he would now focus his efforts on a separate company called Troveo, which implies he won't play a continuing role at the head of Vouch.

Troveo, like Vouch, serves the creator economy. It's a content-licensing platform that helps creators get paid by AI companies who want to use them to train their models.

According to the landing page, "Creators on Troveo can earn more than $1M for every 3,000 hours of content submitted."

What was Vouch like?

Pesis launched Vouch in 2021, possibly making it the world's first creator recruitment website.

The LinkedIn-style profiles allowed content specialists to share their skills while creators posted targeted job ads and shared information about their existing teams:

The platform also used AI to suggest candidates that might work well with particular creators.

Prominent creators like Yes Theory, Jesser, Stokes Twins, Safiya Nygaard, Danny Duncan, and AMP all advertised jobs on Vouch.

The company had several investors, including Seven Seven Six, Liquid 2 Ventures, Shrug Capital and Niche Capital.

It also had a few competitors in the space, including YT Careers, CreatorEconomyJobs, and YTjobs.

If you don't know who MrBeast is…

MrBeast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) is the most successful creator on YouTube. He sells merchandise — and lots of it — alongside his video career. His businesses are thought to be worth around $700 million all-in-all.

He made headlines last month with the leak of an internal onboarding document that raised questions about his business practices. Alongside the nuts and bolts of successful YouTube production, the PDF laid out high staff expectations that some readers say betray a toxic workplace.

If that weren't enough, the creator's production company, MrB2024, is facing a lawsuit from several contestants on an upcoming reality show it's working on with Prime Video.

Five contestants allege they "particularly and collectively suffered" in a setting that "systematically fostered a culture of misogyny and sexism," during production. According to The New York Times, there were numerous hospitalizations on set.