Photo and video applications aimed at young adults with social hooks are a coin a dozen these days, so those who show withdrawals with 18-forty-root tend to attract the attention of investors looking for future Instagram or Tik.
In the latest example, the Yope photo sharing app, which allows you to still share images into private groups, says it has accumulated 2.2 million monthly active users and 800,000 daily active users, with 30x growth in the last six months. And in perhaps one of the most important metrics in what is a LOT Fickle Market, the company currently claims 40% of the seven-day-old retention, 40% of users are still using the app seven days after its installation.
All this is translated into a host of activity between VCs.
Techcrunch has learned and confirmed that the beginning of Yope has now raised a $ 4.65m seed round for a $ 50m rating. Goodwater Capital is leading round, with Inovo Vc and Redseed Participants, along with angels including Jean de la Rochebrochard; Greg Tcachenko, who sold the Face Factory Animation Company he on Snapchat in 2020; Co -founder of the Reface Application (and A16z Scout) Dima Shevts; and former Google student Andrei Tcachenk.
“Yope is running people/CCVs a little crazy,” told a Techcrunch source, who added that some have referred to him as “new Instagram”.
APPLICATION
Yope’s interface is pretty simple: you make a photo in the app, or choose one of your library and send it to a group conversation that you have joined or created yourself. There, you will also see images separated by other members of the group, where you can respond to photos and talk to the rest of the group. Each group also has a wall, a feature where Yope uses machinery lesson to cut and chop the images, combining the pictures accumulated in an endless collage.
To increase engagement, Yope has inspired other social networks, both in good and bad ways. A widget of the lock screen allows you to see the latest photos from a group. A feature of the line encourages users to continue to post. A feature called Recap runs a show of shared footage – similar to Google Photos and Apple’s Photos app. On board for the first time, applications IS possible.
The company has built the ambassadors’ program to run awareness and installations with payments for power users they post about the app on other platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram. Yope said the videos created by these ambassadors had over 56 million views. The company refused to say how many installations of those videos, but generally about 70-80% of its users are coming through others inviting them to the app.
Bahram Ismailau, CEO of Yope and co -founder, said Yope wants to reach 50 million active users monthly by next year.
It is also planning further features. The video has not started yet, but this is in the works, the company said. Another is a daily incentive of control that will attract users to control their group, and see the photos they have posted, and respond to them. The company also wants to make the walls more interactive by allowing users to add stickers, paint doodles and zoom/go out to see days, months or years, and add new formats such as disappearance photos with a screen time of blocking.
He also wants to launch a family group format to extend the use of the app beyond its essential basis of Gen-Z users: Currently, the average age of users in the app is 18.
While concentration is in bringing more users, Yope is also thinking about income ideas, starting with reconciliation plans.
A bumpy route for growth
Yope, the app, may have removed quite recently, but yope the beginning has been around for much longer, and initially did not. Founded in 2021 by Ismailau and Paul Rudkouski – who had studied together at the Belarus State University in Minsk – the team worked for years and required a hit.
An app, Salo, was a chat app on social networks that billed himself as “the next generation of discussion of things”. (Initially, the beginning was called Salo after it.) The pair also built a multi -camera app (similar to Bereal). In 2023, it was directed to a product for podcast’s asynchronous video registration. Then, in September 2024, the company finally made another pivot to create yope.
The start has a team scattered in different countries, including New York, Miami, Lisbon and London (where they have an office). The company said it plans to open an R&D center in the future and is discovering about the countries.
The basic connection of Yope as a place to share photos and conversations into private groups seems to fill a gap in the market.
Yes, you can create groups on WhatsApp and Snapchat. Yes, some have created account of private groups on Instagram. But sharing photos, with a little conversation about it, are not really the main use of any of these big applications.
Moreover, Instagram seems to have given up the duplication of the idea: flipsy, the Instagram attempt to build private groups, was interrupted just five months after it began.
“Instagram and Snapchat have become curated content platforms. While Gen Z use users take a lot of photos, only 1% of them are separate,” Ismailau said. Yope’s focus, he said, was also very different from Snapchat and Instagram. It is especially about sharing “non -filtered content,” he added.
In fact, there have been dozens others who have tried to build businesses about the idea of ​​dividing into private groups. The latest efforts include the flowering retro retro supported by the Marissa Mayer capital and the sun, but the efforts extend all the way to Path in 2010.
The truth is that none of them have really stalled. Is this a signal that probably private groups cannot be a big business, independent as default? Yope believes that time may have come to give the concept another crack.
“In goodwater, we invest in determining customer applications in the category, and Yope is a key example of new social behavior,” said Goowater co-founder and management partner Chi-Hua Chien, told Techcrunch in an email . “Yope is making it easier for everyone to share their daily lives with close friends. Their explosive growth speaks volumes about the strength of the product and their team.”
The growth really looks good for Yope, but the proof will be how it manages to keep it. Bereal (another app that tried to build a private group vibe) had a year or two hot years, even inspiring a clone from Meta, before growth slowly slowed down. (This app was finally purchased by Voodoo Apps and Games.)
The team hopes, after many losses in the category – and in their efforts to build large applications – Yope will become an elusive hit.
“They are working hard,” a QV told us, who is not supporting the beginning.
