The people
What they build
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Working at Sam
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About
Sam started, as McCausland told the TechTO stage in September 2015, from wondering what the opposite of Facebook would look like: not a curated version of your life for friends and family, but something private, messy and honest. Two strangers texted the same number and were connected one to one, anonymously. Seeded with Facebook ads, it reached about four thousand users and just over half a million text messages in its first month. The founders expected to police it and mostly did not have to — about two of those four thousand users were banned, and a banned user was quietly handed to a chatbot instead. Hugging Face acquired the company in September 2017, by which point BetaKit reported 20 million messages across 1.2 million conversations. Keebler and McCausland did not join the acquirer.
Backers
No funding round was announced before the 2017 sale to Hugging Face; none was found in the sources checked on 2026-09-22.
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Quick answers
What was Sam?
An anonymous one-to-one chat service reached by text message. Two people who had texted the same number were paired for a conversation; an iPhone app was added later and interoperated with the SMS side.
Who founded Sam?
Jonathan Keebler and Matt McCausland, who BetaKit described on September 22, 2015 as "known best as the forces behind ScribbleLive". BetaKit's September 13, 2017 acquisition story names them both as the company's co-founders.
What happened to Sam?
Hugging Face, then a New York chatbot company, acquired it in an announcement BetaKit published on September 13, 2017. Neither founder joined the acquirer. The product domain sam.best no longer serves it, checked 2026-09-22.