Tech

What it's like to use the social life-organizing app Snapchat is buying for $200 million

By Rob Price
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AP Images/Mike Harrington

Snapchat is dropping a cool $200 million on buying Vurb — a search and recommendation app.

The news was broken by tech industry site The Information, and independently confirmed by Business Insider.

Vurb basically helps you plan your social life: Giving recommendations on what you can do in your local area, offering ways to talk to your friends, and letting you search for activities and services. 

But what is Vurb, which is available on both iOS and Android, actually like to use?

Read on, we've got you covered:

It's often described as a search engine.

vurb screenshot
BI

Vurb is sometimes described as a "search engine" in a similar vein to Google — and on booting up the app for the first time and making an account, you're greeted with a great big search bar.

It also comes full of recommendations.

vurb
BI

Below the search bar sits a whole load of recommendations for activities in the area, from events to cafés, from new movies to the TV that's airing tonight.

And you can customise what sort of recommendations you see by changing your preferences.

vurb
vurb

It also comes with social options: You can message your friends, and share events and activities with them.

vurb
BI

And there's also a "Feed," much like Facebook's News Feed, that will show activity from people and "decks" (curated collections of activities) you follow.

vurb
BI

However, Vurb never really took off.

vurb
bi

Vurb tries to be a lot of things at once: A messaging app, a social network, a recommendation service, and even a real-world-focused search engine. 

The startup is five years old, with financial backers including Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Tencent, and Redpoint Ventures — but it never really found a mass consumer following.

But now the app has found an exit.

vurb
BI

Snapchat is now paying $200 million for Vurb — with (roughly) half of that going to investors, and half of that going to employees as retention payouts to stop them leaving post-acquisition.

"A person familiar with the deal speculated that Snapchat is mainly interested in Vurb's team, which is highly regarded, rather than its product, which hasn't really taken off," reported my colleague Alex Heath. "Hence, the high percentage of the sale devoted to retaining Vurb employees."

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Reporter Rob Price sitting at a table
Rob Price
Rob Price was a senior correspondent at Business Insider, based in San Francisco. He wrote investigations and long-form features about platforms, people, and power in Silicon Valley.His stories variously led to attorney general investigations, large-scale internal reviews at major tech companies, high-profile personnel departures, citation by state and federal lawmakers, and the closure of a well-funded startup. His 2022 story on the Bitfinex hack is being adapted into a feature film, and in 2024 he received an SPJ NorCal Excellence in Journalism award for his reporting on AI and relationships.Rob's scoops and exclusive stories were cited by The New York Times, Bloomberg, the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, CNBC, Politico, The Guardian, Axios, and many other national and international publications. His writing has also been published in or syndicated by The Washington Post, The Independent, Vice, Slate, and elsewhere, and he appeared on CNN, the BBC, CBS, Reuters, ABC Australia, and other broadcast media to discuss technology, business, and culture.He worked for Business Insider from 2015 to 2025. Prior to joining the features team, Rob covered Facebook and Silicon Valley, and before that wrote about tech business, policy, and the gig economy in London. Between September and October 2019, he was acting executive editor for Business Insider's UK bureau. He also sat on the board of directors for the San Francisco Press Club, the leading non-profit media advocacy group in the Bay Area, and was a volunteer crew member at the Marine Mammal Center, the world's largest animal hospital for marine mammals. You can contact Rob Price via email at robaeprice@gmail.com, or +1 650-636-6268 (Signal / WhatsApp / Cell). Selected stories:— They spoke out against their employer. Then they were hit with trade secrets suits.— The rise of 'shadow stand-ins'— App, Lover, Muse: Inside a 47-year-old Minnesota man's three-year relationship with an AI chatbot— Deel Speed: The inside story of a $12 billion HR startup's breakneck growth— Private islands, flying cars, and psychedelic parties: Inside the wild post-Google lives of Larry Page and Sergey Brin— 'I want your Instagram account': First came the threatening texts, followed by the SWAT teams. Then someone wound up dead.— Inside Iconiq: How Mark Zuckerberg's banker built a secret Silicon Valley empire and made billions— Gaia was a wildly popular yoga brand. Now it's a publicly traded Netflix rival pushing conspiracy theories while employees fear the CEO is invading their dreams— A drunken late-night assault allegation has roiled the secretive world of Mark Zuckerberg's private family office. Personal aides are speaking out about claims that household staff endured sexual harassment and racism from their colleagues.
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