Mammoth Media
AcquiredSanta Monica, US · Founded 2015 · 2 known investors
Mammoth/TokenBot operates a social trading engine that lets traders connect exchange API keys to broadcast real-time algorithmic and technical trade orders to their Telegram and Discord communities, keeping members in sync. It also runs a token-gated VIP community (TKB) with staking, XP rewards, and an ERC-20 membership utility token.
Founders & leadership
Mammoth Media was founded in 2015 by Benoit Vatere and Matthew Turner.
Board
Investors · 2
Also in the syndicate · 1
Company profile
researched Aug 2026IMPORTANT DISAMBIGUATION: This profile is for the mobile entertainment/media startup 'Mammoth Media' at the domain mammoth.la, headquartered in Santa Monica, CA and founded by Benoit Vatere and Matthew Turner — NOT Mammoth Biosciences (the San Francisco CRISPR diagnostics biotech), not Mammoth Cyber, and not the several unrelated small businesses also named 'Mammoth Media' found on Crunchbase (e.g., a North Carolina web-design/SEM firm at mammothmedia.org, or a Massachusetts grand-format printing company acquired by Circle Graphics). Identity was verified by cross-referencing Greylock Partners' own live portfolio page (greylock.com/portfolio/mammoth-media/), which lists the company's schema.org Organization record with url 'http://mammoth.la', founders Benoit Vatere (CEO & Co-Founder) and Matthew Turner (CTO & Co-Founder), address 'Santa Monica, CA, USA', and social links (LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/mammoth-media-a-science-company/, Twitter: twitter.com/mammothmedia) — all of which match the TechCrunch coverage of the same company's Series A and CatchUp launch.
Origin story: The company's roots trace to Wishbone, a social polling/comparison app ('who's cuter?' style) aimed at tweens and teens, which was built inside Science Inc., the Santa Monica startup studio co-founded by former MySpace CEO Michael Jones. Science operated an incubation model (capital + shared services for equity) rather than always issuing traditional seed rounds, so no separate disclosed seed round could be confirmed for Wishbone/Mammoth beyond the Series A. Wishbone suffered a significant data breach in March 2017 (reported by TechCrunch) in which a vulnerable private API exposed roughly 2.2 million user email addresses and 287,000 phone numbers (no passwords or financial data exposed); at the time Wishbone ranked #14 in the Social Networking category on the U.S. iTunes chart. Crunchbase data (via person lookup) shows Benoit Vatere as CEO & Co-Founder of 'Mammoth' since May 2015, while also serving as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Science Inc. since April 2013 — consistent with Mammoth Media being the corporate entity formed to house and grow the Wishbone product family.
Funding: On January 30, 2018, TechCrunch reported that Mammoth Media raised a $13 million Series A round led by Greylock Partners, with Science Inc. also participating (continuing its incubator relationship). Then-Greylock general partner Josh Elman joined the Mammoth Media board as part of the round; a subsequent March 2018 TechCrunch article about Elman's move to a venture-partner role at Greylock (while also taking a VP of Product role at Robinhood) explicitly lists Mammoth Media (described there as 'parent company of... Yarn') among his board seats, corroborating the Greylock/Elman relationship from a second independent source. Total disclosed funding is therefore $13M (Series A only); no earlier seed round, later rounds, or valuation figures could be confirmed in public sources.
Business model
Mobile app studio ("media company") that builds, owns and operates a portfolio of consumer content apps monetized directly, rather than a single product; apps span social polling (Wishbone), interactive/chat fiction (Yarn) and short-form video news summaries (CatchUp).
Consumer subscriptions (e.g., Yarn premium stories starting at $2.99/week), brand sponsorships/branded content (e.g., a Yarn x Skype sponsored story series), and planned advertising and in-app purchases (CatchUp).
▸Full profile — profile (continued), go-to-market, ownership
Profile (continued)
Product evolution: By the time of the Series A, the company's second major app was Yarn, a 'chat fiction' app presenting serialized stories in a text-message-like interface, with premium subscriptions starting at $2.99/week; TechCrunch reported Yarn was the #1 Books app in multiple countries including the U.S., that average subscribers spent about 50 minutes reading in their first week, and that Yarn had launched a horror series ('Hack'd') featuring Musical.ly star Kristen Hancher, plus a sponsored-story partnership with Skype. In March 2020, TechCrunch covered the launch of Mammoth's third app, CatchUp, which delivers brief, vertically formatted video summaries of trending news and entertainment stories; Vatere described it as an evolution of an earlier, narrower concept called 'Booknotes' (book summaries) that was broadened after user demand for other content types.
Current status and caveats: Greylock's own portfolio page marks Mammoth Media's status as 'Acquired,' but no independent news source, press release, or acquirer name/date/price could be located to corroborate an acquisition — this status should be treated as directionally credible (coming from the lead investor's own site) but NOT independently confirmed, and is flagged here rather than asserted with confidence. Circumstantial evidence is consistent with Mammoth's products being folded back into its original incubator: as of this research (August 2026), an iTunes Search API lookup shows the Yarn app ('Yarn - Chat & Text Stories') is still live but listed under the developer/seller name 'Science AI Studios, Inc.' rather than Mammoth Media, while Wishbone and CatchUp no longer appear in App Store search results at all, suggesting they have been discontinued or removed. Separately, the mammoth.la domain itself no longer resolves to any Mammoth Media content — as of this research it redirects to/serves an unrelated crypto trading-tools website ('TokenBot,' a multi-exchange trade-synchronization platform), indicating the original company's website has lapsed or the domain has been repurposed; a Wayback Machine snapshot exists from April 2025, but could not be retrieved in this session due to network restrictions, so the live former homepage content could not be directly verified beyond what Greylock's and TechCrunch's archived descriptions confirm. Given the domain repurposing, defunct products, and the 'Acquired' tag with no named acquirer, the true current operating status is best described as inactive/discontinued in its original form, though 'acquired' is used here per the one credible source that states it, with this caveat prominently noted.
Competitors in the chat-fiction space included Hooked (also a Greylock/Josh Elman-backed portfolio company, seeded by Greylock according to the March 2018 TechCrunch piece) and Episode Interactive; in the social-polling/teen-content space, competitors included apps like Sarahah and other UGC-driven social apps popular in the same 2015-2018 teen-app boom. No specific named B2B customers exist since Mammoth's products were B2C consumer apps monetized via subscriptions, sponsorships (e.g., Skype) and advertising.
Go-to-market
Teen and young-adult mobile-first consumers (Gen Z), initially in the U.S.
Ownership
private
Compiled by commissioned research from 10 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Timeline · 4
launches, deals, and filingsMammoth Media launched CatchUp, a vertical short-video news/entertainment summary app, evolved from an earlier book-summary concept called 'Booknotes'.
Greylock Partners led a $13 million Series A in Mammoth Media alongside Science Inc.; Greylock's Josh Elman joined the board.
A vulnerable private API exposed roughly 2.2 million user emails and 287,000 phone numbers; no passwords or payment data were exposed.
Benoit Vatere becomes CEO & Co-Founder of Mammoth (per Crunchbase); grew out of the Wishbone app incubated within Science Inc.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
In the news
▸Research sources · 10
primary sources listed
- Greylock Partners PortfolioGreylock Partners · company site
- Mammoth Media | GreylockGreylock Partners · company site
10 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Mammoth Media do?
- The world's only mobile-first media company.
- Who founded Mammoth Media?
- Mammoth Media was founded by Benoit Vatere, Matthew Turner in 2015.
- Who are Mammoth Media's investors?
- Mammoth Media's investors include Greylock Partners.
- Where is Mammoth Media headquartered?
- Mammoth Media is headquartered in Santa Monica, US.