Beast Industries, the entertainment company founded by YouTuber Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, is acquiring Step, a mobile banking app focused on teenagers and young adults, marking its most significant push into finance to date.
In a post to X on Monday, Donaldson said the motivation behind the acquisition was to equip young people with the tools and guidance needed to navigate personal finance from an early age.
Beast Industries CEO Jeff Housenbold said, “Financial health is fundamental to overall wellbeing, yet too many people lack access to the tools and knowledge they need to build financial security.”
The acquisition cost was not disclosed.
The YouTube channel’s expansion into finance comes after it received a $200 million investment from Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies in January and a separate trademark filing for “MrBeast Financial” in October.
That trademark filing mentioned “cryptocurrency exchange services,” “cryptocurrency payment processing,” and “cryptocurrency via decentralized exchanges.”
However, it isn’t clear whether that trademark filing is related to the Step acquisition.
Cointelegraph reached out to Beast Industries for comment, but didn’t receive an immediate response.
Step scales to 6.5 million users in 8 years
The Step app aims to help Gen Z users manage money, build credit, earn rewards, and deepen their financial literacy. Spending accounts are Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation-insured through Evolve Bank & Trust.
The banking app has scaled to 6.5 million users since launching in 2018, having raised around $500 million from the likes of Steph Curry, Justin Timberlake, Will Smith, and Charli D’Amelio.
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The MrBeast YouTube channel has 466 million subscribers, the largest channel on the video-streaming platform.
Housenbold said the Step acquisition “positions us to meet our audiences where they are, with practical, technology-driven solutions that can transform their financial futures for the better.”
At the time of the strategic $200 million BitMine investment, its chair, Tom Lee, said the company viewed the deal as a long-term bet on the creator economy, stating:
“MrBeast and Beast Industries, in our view, is the leading content creator of our generation, with a reach and engagement unmatched with GenZ, GenAlpha and Millennials.”
Lee said that BitMine’s corporate values were “strongly aligned” with Beast Industries, but didn’t mention anything about integrating crypto at the time.
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