Photo and video apps aimed at young adults with social hooks are a dozen of twelve these days, so those who show attraction with 18-twentysomethings tend to attract the attention of investors looking for the next Instagram or Tiktok.
In the last example, the photo exchange application YesIt allows you to share immovable images in private groups, says it has garnered 2.2 million monthly active users and 800,000 daily active users, with an increase of 30x in the last six months. And perhaps one of the most important measurements in what is very Fickle Market, the company today claims that 40% daily seven retention-that is, 40% of users still use the application seven days after installation.
All of this translates into a turmoil of the activity between VCs.
TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the start of Yope has now increased an initial $ 4.65 million seed round to valuation $ 50 million. Goodwater Capital drives the round, with the Inovo VC and Redseed participating, along with the angels including Jean de la Ricebrocard. Greg Tkachenko, who sold the Face Animation Company AI to Snapchat in 2020. Reface app co -founder (and A16Z scout) Dima Shevs. and former Google researcher Andrei Tkachenk.
“Yope drives people/VCS a little crazy,” a source told TechCrunch, who added that some have been optimistic as “the new Instagram”.
The application
Yope’s interface is quite simple: Take a photo in the app or select one of your library and send it to a group conversation that you have integrated or create yourself. There, you will also see pictures shared by other team members, where you can react to photos and chat with the rest of the team. Each group also has a wall, a feature where Yope uses mechanical learning to cut and assemble images, combining centralized images in an endless photo collage.
To enhance the involvement, Yope has inspired other social networks, both in good and bad ways. A locking widget allows you to see the latest photos from a group. A series mode encourages users to continue publishing. A feature called RECAP performs a presentation of shared images – similar to Google photos and the Photos’s Photos application. Onboarding for the first time, the app makes to leave any of them deliberately confused but that is possible.
The company has set up the ambassador program to drive awareness and installations, also with payments to users publishing on app on other platforms such as Tiktok and Instagram. Yope said the videos created by these ambassadors had over 56 million views. The company declined to say how many of these videos have led, but about 70-80% of its users come through others who invite them to the application.
Bahram Ismailau, chief executive and co -founder of Yope, said Yope wants to reach 50 million monthly active users by next year.
It also designs further features. It has not yet begun videos, but this is in the projects, the company said. Another is a daily check-in trigger that will push users to check their team and see the photos they have published and react to them. The company also wants to make the walls more interactive, allowing users to add stickers, paint doodles and enlarge/out to see days, months or years, and add new forms such as the disappearance of photos with a lock -timer.
It also wants to start a family group form to extend the use of the application beyond the basic base of Gen-Z users: At present, the average age of users in the application is 18.
While the focus is to bring more users, Yope also thinks of revenue ideas, starting with subscription plans.
An abnormal road to growth
Yope, the application, may have taken off quite recently, but Yope the start was around for much more, and initially it didn’t. Founded in 2021 by Ismailau and Paul Rudkouski – who had studied together at the State University of Belarus in Minsk – the team worked for years and was looking for a blow.
An application, Salo, was a social networking application charged as “the next general of the discussion of things”. (Initially, the start was named Salo after that.) The twin also created a multi -camera application (similar to Bereal). In 2023, it revolved on a product to record asynchronous podcasts videos. Then, in September 2024, the company finally made another axis to create Yope.
The start has a scattered group in different locations, such as New York, Miami, Lisbon and London (where they have an office). The company said it plans to open a R&D center in the future and invites locations.
Yope’s main hook as a place to share photos and conversations in private teams seems to fill a gap in the market.
Yes, you can create teams in WhatsApp and Snapchat. Yes, some have created private teams on Instagram. But sharing photos, with a small conversation about it, is not really the main cases of use for any of these huge applications.
In addition, Instagram seems to have actually abandoned the idea of doubling: it was Flipside, Instagram’s very attempt to build private groups vacation Just five months after the start.
“Instagram and Snapchat have become platforms for edited content. While Gen Z users take many photos, only 1% of them share,” Ismailau said. Yope’s focus, he said, was also very different from Snapchat and Instagram. This is specifically sharing “unpaid content”, he added.
In fact, there were dozens of others who tried to build businesses around the idea to share in private groups. The latest efforts include the sunshine of Retro and Marissa Mayer, but efforts extend all the way to the trail in 2010.
The truth is that none of them are really stuck. Is it a message that maybe private groups can’t be a big, autonomous business by default? Yope believes that time may have come to give the idea another crack.
“In Goodwater, we are investing in consumer applications that determine the category and Yope is a primary example of a new new social behavior,” the co-founder and chief executive of Gowater, Chi-Hua Chien told TechCrunch. “Yope makes it easy for everyone to share their daily lives with close friends. Their explosive growth speaks tumors about the power of the product and their team.”
Growth really looks good for Yope, but the proof will be in how it manages to maintain it. Bereal (another application that tried to build a private group) had a warm year or two, even inspiring a clone from Meta, before rapidly slowing growth. (This app was finally obtained by app and games Company Voodoo.)
The team hopes, after many losses in the category – and in its own efforts to build large applications – Yope will become the indefinite blow.
“They work hard,” one VC told us, who does not support the start.
