Flip (Humans, Inc.)

How it happened

Flip was a TikTok-style social shopping app from El Segundo that paid users to post shoppable video reviews, claiming 5 billion video views and $13.4M paid to creators. A $144M Series C in April 2024 — Streamlined Ventures, WestCap, Mubadala, and a $50M strategic check from AppLovin — priced it at $1.05B barely three years after its late-2021 founding. The growth ran on steep referral rewards and free-product incentives that never became sustainable economics against TikTok Shop and Amazon, and after layoff rounds through 2025 the app went dark that August with no advance notice to the creators and brands on it, its landing page swapped for a farewell note. Roughly $236M had gone in.