Yope is sparking GenZ (and VC) interest with an Instagram-like app for private groups

Photo and video apps that young adults aim with social hooks are a dozen nowadays. Those who show traction with 18-teen-twentysomethings tend to draw the attention of investors who are looking for the next Instagram or Tiktok.

In the latest example, the photo sharing app YopeWith the enabling of breastfeeding images to private groups, there is 2.2 million active users and 800,000 daily active users with growth of 30 times in the past six months. And perhaps one of the most important metrics in what a is very The moody market currently claims 40% daily binding DH 40% of users use the app seven days after installation.

All of this leads to a flood of activity between VCS.

Techcrunch has learned and confirmed that the startup behind Yope has now collected a first seed round of 4.65 million US dollars for an assessment of $ 50 million. Goodwater Capital leads the round with the participation of Inovo VC and Redseed, alongside angels to which Jean de la Rochebrochard belongs. Greg Tkachenko, the face animated company sold AI factory for Snapchat in 2020; Restore the app Co -founder (and A16Z Scout) Dima Shevts; and ex-google researcher Andrei Tkachenk.

“Yope makes people/VCs a little crazy,” said a source towards Techcrunch, who was added that some were optimistic as “the new Instagram”.

The app

The YOPE user interface is pretty simple: you take a photo in the app or select one from your library and send it to a group chat that you have joined or created yourself. There you can also see pictures that are shared by other group members in which you can react to pictures and chat with the rest of the group. Each group also has a wall, a feature in which Yope uses machine learning to cut out and split pictures and combine the aggregated images in an endless photo collage.

In order to promote the commitment, Yope has been inspired in good and bad species other social networks. With a widget of the lock screen you can see the latest photos of a group. A patrol function encourages users to continue publishing. A function called Recap carries out a slide show of the shared images – similar to Google Photos and Apple’s photos app. For the first time on board, the app deliberately makes this deliberately confusing, but it Is possible.

The company has developed the ambassador program to sharpen and install awareness, with payouts to power users who post on other platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. Yope said that videos created by these ambassadors had over 56 million views. The company rejected it to say how many installed these videos have driven, but a total of around 70-80% of users by others who invite them to the app.

Bahram Ismailau, CEO and co -founder of Yope said that Yope wants to reach 50 million active users by the next year.

There are also other functions. No video has started yet, but that’s in the works, said the company. Another is a daily check-in trigger who nudge the users to check their group and see the photos they published and react to them. The company also wants to make the walls more interactive by adding users to add stickers, adding doodles and zooming on/out to see days, months or years and add new formats such as vailling photos with a lock screen timer.

A family group format would also like to launch the use of the app beyond its core base of Gen-Z users: the average age of the user in the app is currently 18.

While the focus is on taking up more users, Yope also thinks about revenue ideas, starting with subscription plans.

A bumpy path to growth

Yope, the app, may have lost a lot recently, but Yope the Startup has been around for much longer, and it didn’t work at first. The team was founded in 2021 by Ismailau and Paul Rudkouski, who had studied together at Belarusian State University in Minsk.

An app, Salo, was a chat app for social networks that was “the next generation of the discussion of things”. (Originally the startup Salo was mentioned afterwards.) The duo also built a multi-camera app (similar to BEAAL). In 2023 it was a product for recording asynchronous video podcasts. Then, in September 2024, the company finally took another pivot point to create Yope.

The startup has a scattered team at different locations, including New York, Miami, Lisbon and London (where you have an office). The company said it is planning to open a F&E center in the future and is looking for locations.

Yopes basic hook as a place to share photos and chats in private groups seems to close a gap in the market.

Yes, you can create groups in WhatsApp and Snapchat. Yes, some have created private group contains on Instagram. But taking pictures with a little conversation is not really the main cases for these huge apps.

In addition, it seems to have given up Instagram to have really doubled the idea: FlipsideWas Instagram’s own attempt to build private groups set Just five months after the start.

“Instagram and Snapchat have become platforms for curated content. While Z -users take many photos, only 1% of them are shared, ”said Ismailau. Yopes focus, he said, was also very different from Snapchat and Instagram. It is specifically about sharing “not filtered content”, he added.

In fact, there were dozens of others who tried to build companies in private groups with regard to the idea of ​​sharing. The newer efforts include Thrive Capital Backed Retro and Marissa Mayer sunshinebut the efforts extend Path in 2010.

The truth is that none of them really stuck. Is this a signal that private groups cannot be a big independent business by default? Yope believes that the time could have come to give the concept another crack.

“At Goodwater, we are investing in category-defined consumer apps, and Yope is an excellent example of an important new social behavior,” said the co-founder and managing director of Goowater, Chi-Hua Chien, to Techcrunch in an email. “Yope makes it easy for everyone to share their daily life with close friends. Her explosive growth speaks volumes about the strength of your product and the team. “

In fact, growth looks good for Yope, but the proof is how it manages to support this. Beaeal (another app that tried to build a private group mood) had one Hot years or two yearseven inspire a clone of meta before growth slowly slowed down. (This app was finally acquired After app and game companies voodoo.))

The team hopes that after many flours in the category – and in its own efforts to make large apps – a difficult hit.

“You work hard,” said a VC who does not support the startup to us.