Photo and video applications targeting young adults with social hooks are a penny these days, so those who show a traction with 18 Twentysometages tend to attract the attention of investors looking for the next Instagram or the Tiktok.
In the latest example, the photo sharing application Yopewhich allows you to share fixed images to private groups, indicates that it has accumulated 2.2 million monthly active users and 800,000 daily active users, with 30x growth in the last six months. And perhaps in one of the most important measures of what is a very Fickle Market, the company is currently calling for 40% retention of the day-that is to say that 40% of users still use the seven days after installation.
All this results in a wave of activity among the VCs.
Techcrunch learned and confirmed that the startup behind Yope has now raised a first series of seeds of $ 4.65 million on an evaluation of $ 50 million. Goodwater Capital takes the tour, with Inovo VC and Redseed participating, alongside the Angels who include Jean de La Rochebrochard; Greg Tkachenko, who sold Factory Animation Aide Factory in Snapchat in 2020; The co-founder of the Reface application (and A16Z Scout) Dima Shevts; And the former researcher from Google Andrei Tkachenk.
“Yope makes people / VC a little crazy,” said a source to Techcrunch, who added that some have made it optimisticly referred to it as “the new Instagram”.
The application
Yope’s interface is quite simple: you take a photo in the application, or choose one in your library and send it to a group cat that you have joined or created yourself. There, you will also see images shared by other members of the group, where you can react to the photos and chat with the rest of the group. Each group also has a wall, a characteristic where Yope uses automatic learning to cut and spit images, combining aggregated images in an endless photo collage.
To stimulate commitment, Yope inspired other social networks, both good and bad ways. A locking screen widget allows you to see the most recent photos of a group. A sequence feature encourages users to continue to publish. A functionality called recap performs a slideshow of shared images – similar to Google Photos and the Apple Photos Application. Integration for the first time, the application has the withdrawal of one of these intentionally confusing, but it East possible.
The company has also built an ambassador program to stimulate awareness and installations, with payments to powerful users who publish on the application on other platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram. Yope said the videos created by these ambassadors had more than 56 million views. The company refused to say how many installations have led these videos, but overall, some 70 to 80% of its users reach others who invite them to the application.
Bahram Ismailau, CEO and co-founder of Yope, said that Yope wanted to reach 50 million monthly active users by next year.
It also plans other features. He has not yet launched a video, but it is in preparation, said the company. Another is a daily recording trigger that will encourage users to check their group and see the photos they have published and react to them. The company also wishes to make the walls more interactive by allowing users to add stickers, paint scratches and zoom in to see days, months or years, and to add new formats such as photos of Leak with a timer timer.
He also wishes to launch a family group format to extend the use of the application beyond his main Gen-Z users: currently, the average age of users on the application is 18 years.
Although the emphasis is on writing more users, Yope also thinks of income ideas, starting with subscription plans.
A bumpy path to growth
Yope, the application, may have taken off quite recently, but Yope The Startup has existed for much longer, and it has not been initially. Founded in 2021 by Ismailau and Paul Rudkouski – who had studied together at the Belarusian State University in Minsk – the team has worked for years to tinker and seek success.
An application, Salo, was an application of social networking chat which presented itself as “the next generation of the discussion of things”. (Originally, the startup was called Salo after her.) The duo also built a multi-camura application (similar to Bereal). In 2023, he pivoted a product to record asynchronous video podcasts. Then, in September 2024, the company finally made another pivot to create Yope.
The startup has a team dispersed in different places, notably New York, Miami, Lisbon and London (where they have an office). The company said it was planning to open a R&D center in the future and locate locations.
The basic hook of Yope as a pass to share photos and cats in private groups seems to fill a gap on the market.
Yes, you can create groups in WhatsApp and Snapchat. Yes, some have created private group accounts on Instagram. But sharing photos, with a little discussion around this, is not really the main use cases for one of these huge applications.
In addition, Instagram seems to have given up really giving back to the idea: the reverse, the clean attempt of Instagram to build private groups, was interrupted Only five months after its launch.
“Instagram and snapchat have become organized content platforms. While generation Z users take many photos, only 1% of them are shared, “said Ismailau. Yope’s orientation, he said, was also very different from Snapchat and Instagram. This is specifically the sharing of “unremitted content”, he added.
There have in fact been dozens of others who tried to create companies around the idea of sharing private groups. The more recent efforts include Thrive Retro supported by Capital and Sunshine by Marissa Mayer, but the efforts extend to the way in 2010.
The truth is that none of them really stayed. Is this a signal that private groups may not be able to be a large autonomous company by default? Yope believes that the moment could have given the concept another crack.
“At Goodwater, we invest in consumption applications defining the categories, and Yope is an excellent example of a new important social behavior,” Techcrunch, co-founder and director of Goowater, Chi-Hua Dog. “Yope allows everyone to easily share their daily life with close friends. Their explosive growth speaks volumes about the strength of their product and their team. »»
Growth seems good for Yope, but the proof will be in the way it will be able to support this. Bereal (another application that tried to build a private group atmosphere) had a hot or two year, even inspiring a Meta clone, before growth quickly decelerated. (This application was finally acquired by the application and the Voodoo Gaming Company.)
The team hopes, after many failures in the category – and in their own efforts to create major applications – Yope will become elusive success.
“They work hard,” said a VC, which does not support the startup.
