With a dozen recent photos and video apps targeting young adults on social hooks, what shows traction in 18 2-Can comedy will catch the attention of investors looking for their next Instagram or Tiktok There is a trend.
In the latest example, Yope’s photo sharing app can be shared with individual groups, and has grown 30 times over the past six months, gaining 2.2 million active users every month and 800,000 active users every day. It states. And, perhaps one of the most important indicators in a very whimsical market, the company currently claims to hold 40% of its 7 days. This means that 40% of users are still using the app 7 days after installation.
It’s all converted into gusts of activity between the VCs.
TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the startup behind Yope has raised an initial seed round of $4.65 million at a $50 million valuation. Goodwater Capital is led in the round with Inovo VC and RedSeeds taking part in the event, along with angels including Jan de La Rochebrochard. Greg Tkachenko sold the Face Animation Company AI Factory to Snapchat in 2020. Co-founder (and A16z scout) of the referral app Dima Shevts. Former Google researcher Andrei Tokachenk.
“Yope is driving people/VCs a little crazy,” a source told TechCrunch.
App
Yope’s interface is very simple. Take a photo with the app or choose it from the library and send it to the group chat you joined or created. There, images shared by other group members will also be displayed. There you can respond to photos and chat with the rest of the group. Each group also has a wall. It features Yope using machine learning to crop and splice images, combining photos tallied in endless photo collages.
To boost engagement, Yope has inspired other social networks in good and bad ways. The Lock Screen widget allows you to see the latest photos from the group. The streak feature encourages users to continue posting. A feature called Recap runs a slideshow of shared images similar to Google Photos and Apple’s Photos apps. Only in onboarding will the app opt out of any of these that will be intentionally confused, but it is possible.
The company has built an ambassador program to encourage payments and awareness and installation to power users who post about the app on other platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram. Yope said the videos created by these ambassadors have seen more than 56 million viewers. The company refused to say how many installations those videos drove, but about 70-80% of users are invited to the app via others.
Yope CEO and co-founder Bahram Ismailau said Yope hopes to reach 50 million active users per month by next year.
We are also planning more features. The video hasn’t been launched yet, but this is in the works, the company said. The other is a daily check-in trigger where users check groups, view photos they have posted, and fine-tune users to respond to them. The company also allows users to expand days, months or years by adding stickers, painting doodles, zoom in/out, and disappearing photos with lock screen timers. I want to make my walls more interactive by allowing new formats to be added.
We also want to launch a Family Group format to extend app usage beyond the core base of Gen-Z users. Currently, the average age of users for the app is 18.
Although it focuses on more users, Yope also starts with a subscription plan and thinks about revenue ideas.
The bumpy road to growth
Yope, the app, may have been quite a bit lately, but Yope The Startup has been around for so long and wasn’t that at first. Founded in 2021 by Ismailau and Paul Rudkouski (Paul Rudkouski, who studied together at Belarus State University in Minsk), the team has been bullied for years and looking for a hit.
One app, Salo, was a social networking chat app that bills itself as “the next generation to discuss things.” (The startup was originally called Salo.) The duo also built a multi-camera app (similar to Bereal). In 2023, we pivoted to a product for recording asynchronous video podcasts. Then, in September 2024, the company created another pivot to eventually create a yoop.
The startups have teams scattered across a variety of locations, including New York, Miami, Lisbon and London (with offices). The company said it plans to open an R&D centre in the future and is looking for a location.
Yope’s basic hooks as a place to share photos and chats with private groups seem to fill the market gap.
Yes, you can create groups in WhatsApp and Snapchat. Yes, some people have created private group accounts on Instagram. But chatting a bit about it and sharing photos is not the main use case of any of these huge apps.
Plus, it appears that Instagram has given up on really doubling this idea. Flipside, which is trying to build a private group on Instagram itself, was cancelled just five months after its launch.
“Instagram and Snapchat have become a platform for curated content. Gen Z users take lots of photos, but only 1% of the photos shared,” Ismailau said. Yope’s focus was very different from Snapchat and Instagram, he said. In particular, sharing “unfiltered content.”
In fact, dozens of others have tried to build their businesses around the idea of sharing with private groups. Recent efforts include Retro and Marissa Mayer’s sunshine from Thrive Capital, but the efforts in 2010 go back a long way.
The truth is, none of them really get stuck. Is that perhaps a signal that private groups cannot become large, independent businesses by default? Yope believes it may be time to give this concept another crack.
“At Goodwater, we invest in consumer apps that define categories, Yope is a prime example of important new social behavior,” says Chi-Hua Chien, co-founder and managing partner of Goowater, and we will be introducing TechCrunch to e-mail. I spoke via email. “Yope makes it easy for everyone to share their daily lives with close friends. Their explosive growth speaks volumes about the product and the strength of their team.”
Growth certainly looks good for Yop, but the evidence lies in how it keeps it. Bereal (another app that sought to build a private group vibe) has had a hot year or two that stimulated clones from meta before growth slowed down rapidly. (The app was eventually acquired by the app and gaming company Voodoo.)
The team hopes that after many mistakes in the category, and with their own efforts to build big apps, Yope will become an elusive hit.
“They work hard,” a VC who doesn’t support startups told us.
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