Meemo

About Meemo

Meemo, founded in 2019, operated as a fintech company based in San Francisco before being acqui-hired by Coinbase in 2021. The company was established by a team of veteran engineers, including André Madeira, Wisam Dakka, Ranveer Kunal, and Robson Araújo, who brought extensive experience from their time at Google and Snap. The founders' journey began after leaving Snap in 2018, where they had worked closely with Evan Spiegel and were instrumental in building Snap's San Francisco office. Their background in developing large-scale products for companies like Google and Snap informed their vision to create a more engaging and less stressful financial product for a broad audience.

Meemo developed a mobile application focused on social finance, designed to serve the "one-tap generation". The business model centered on providing a layer on top of a user's existing financial life, using artificial intelligence to deliver personalized insights, rewards, and peer-to-peer sharing capabilities. The application would analyze a user's transaction and purchasing history to automatically provide rewards, such as electronic gift cards for specific merchants, and to offer insights into spending habits. It also facilitated social interactions by allowing users to share experiences, recommend brands, and send cash or "meemos"—a term derived from the Portuguese word for an affectionate treat—to friends. Revenue was not generated by selling user data; instead, the platform was designed to help merchants create loyalty relationships with customers.

The Meemo app, which was available on iOS and Android, allowed users to connect their credit and debit cards to gain an overview of their financial activity. A key feature was its ability to automatically find and apply discounts and cash-back offers from various programs to a user's past transactions. The platform aimed to destigmatize personal finance by making it social and automatic, enabling users to bond over purchasing preferences and discover new brands through friends' activities. After a year in stealth mode, Meemo launched publicly in July 2020, having secured $10 million in funding from investors including Greycroft, Sierra Ventures, Saama Capital, and Monashees. The entire Meemo team joined Coinbase to contribute to data infrastructure and machine learning-powered systems.