Most social apps keep users looking at the screen with a flood of creator content. London-based Yope takes the opposite route. Its feed is not sorted by an algorithm, there is practically no public content on the network, and advertising does not hold it together. Even so, it has grown to almost 15 million registered users and has just raised a seed round of $12.3 million. The round was led by Northzone, an early investor in Spotify and Klarna.
The model rests on small groups of friends
Yope is built on what its founders call “micro communities”, small groups of friends and family who share photos, videos and messages privately. Accounts are private by default, and the company expects revenue to come from a premium subscription for its most active users.
The decision was based on the team’s own research. According to co-founder and CEO Bahram Ismailau, the team used AI tools to hold more than 100,000 conversations with young people around the world. Around 30% of them used so-called photo dump accounts, where they post unpolished photos for a small circle of real friends. Many others share nothing publicly and stay in touch with friends only through messages.
“[Young people] don’t have any place to self-express if they are not ready to be an influencer,” Ismailau told TechCrunch in an interview. “We found this big opportunity to create a new space for young people to be social. We called it Yope, and it’s an AI-native social platform for young people and the next generation.”
More than half of users return five days a week
Yope users share 10 to 20 million photos, videos and stickers a week, according to the company. More than 50% of them open the app at least five days a week, and around 20% of active users have invited an older family member, Ismailau says.
A Yope profile is built from photos that can be turned into cut-out stickers. Instead of albums, they are arranged into a collage on a personal “wall” that is meant to recall Myspace, where people once built their own corner of the web to match their mood. The app also offers the standard toolkit of social networks: messages, highlights and lock screen widgets with photos of friends.
AI is used to connect people
According to Ismailau, the team uses AI to connect people, not to generate content. This includes mini-games that friends play together, which the company expects to gain traction within about a month. AI should later also help people meet in person, for example by buying tickets to an event or choosing a venue where they can watch football together.
US expansion and the BeReal precedent
Investor interest came, according to Ismailau, because of the numbers. Northzone approached the company itself. Inovo, Redseed and Geek Ventures also joined the round, bringing Yope’s total funding to $20 million. The current version of the app took about two years to build and is the result of two earlier changes of direction. The money will go towards product development, expanding the team, which now has around 35 people, and opening an office in the United States.
“Yope is a fresh, empowering and safe take on social media where the users are in full control of their experience in contrast to the predatory practices of Meta, TikTok or X,” said Pär-Jörgen Pärson, partner at Northzone, in a statement.
The category has a ceiling, however. France’s BeReal grew with the same recipe to more than 40 million active users, after which games publisher Voodoo bought it for €500 million. A network like that can attract tens of millions of people, but the path to sustainable revenue is narrow. For brands, Yope is so far a closed space. There is no feed where reach can be bought, and no creators through whom an audience can be reached.
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