Armed with a small group of passionate streamers and an awesome community that we were fortunate enough to work with during our beta, we launched Beam on January 5th. It feels like just yesterday we all sat down in a room and unveiled what we had been working on to the world.

I vividly remember many of the hundreds of late nights that were spent. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code written. Millions of hours of streams during beta. All with the goal of connecting broadcasters to their communities in ways that were never possible before.

Together we’ve come a long way. Expanding our sub-second delay streaming stack to the public, announcing interactive at Startup Battlefield (we won too!), and growing our community to over 100,000 strong in just a few short months, but there’s so much more on the horizon.

It’s always been a dream of mine to make an impact in the lives of gamers all over the world, and I’m extremely excited to announce that we’re taking another huge leap towards making that dream a reality… Beam has been acquired by Microsoft!

As part of Xbox, we’ll be able to scale faster than we’ve ever been able to before. We’re expanding the team, bolstering our infrastructure, and most importantly, continuing to grow and support the amazing community at Beam.

So what changes for you? Nothing right now; we’re continuing our focus on providing streamers with the tools they need to create the most interactive broadcasts around. Beam is designed to work with any game, and we’ll continue to offer broadcasts across all gaming platforms, just as we do today. As Beam becomes part of Team Xbox, you’ll see awesome new features, epic new interactive game integrations, and a huge influx of new community members!

I’ll continue to lead the Beam team in Redmond, now as part of Team Xbox within the Engineering group. You’ll be seeing lots of new faces in the community as we bring on new team members to help grow the platform and I can’t wait for you to meet them.

I need to take the time to thank each and every single member of the Beam community for getting us to where we are today. We quite literally would not be here without you guys. I also want to take the time to specifically thank our Pro users and investors (Techstars, Courtside Ventures, and Ore Ventures) for helping us make Beam a reality.

On a personal note, I’m so proud of the entire team at Beam. I’ve been fortunate enough to work alongside some crazy talented young individuals, and to everyone at Beam: Thank you.

This is just the beginning. I couldn’t be more excited for the next years at Beam and I’m so happy to be able to share this awesome journey with all of you. Let’s do this!

Matt Salsamendi, Co-Founder & CEO