Photo and video apps targeting young adults with social hooks are a dime a dozen these days, so those that show traction with 18-twentysomethings tend to catch the attention of investors looking for the next Instagram or TikTok.

In the latest example, photo-sharing app Yope, which lets you share still images to private groups, says that it has racked up 2.2 million monthly active users and 800,000 daily active users, with 30x growth in last six months. And in perhaps one of the more important metrics in what is a very fickle market, the company currently claims 40% day-seven retention — that is, 40% of users are still using the app seven days after installing it.

All of that is translating to a flurry of activity among VCs.

TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that the startup behind Yope has now raised an initial seed round of $4.65 million on a valuation of $50 million. Goodwater Capital is leading the round, with Inovo VC and Redseed participating, alongside angels who include Jean de La Rochebrochard; Greg Tkachenko, who sold face animation company AI factory to Snapchat in 2020; Reface app co-founder (and a16z scout) Dima Shevts; and ex-Google researcher Andrei Tkachenk.

“Yope is driving people/VCs a bit crazy,” one source told TechCrunch, who added that some have been optimistically referring to it as “the new Instagram.”

The app

Yope’s interface is pretty simple: you take a photo in the app, or you pick one from your library and send it to a group chat that you’ve joined or created yourself. There, you will also see images shared by other group members, where you can react to pics and chat with the rest of the group. Each group also has a wall, a feature where Yope uses machine learning to cut out and splice images, combining the aggregated pictures in an endless photo collage.

To boost engagement, Yope has taken inspiration other social networks, both in good and bad ways. A lock screen widget lets you see the most recent photos from a group. A streak feature encourages users to keep posting. A feature called recap runs a slideshow of the shared images — similar to Google Photos and Apple’s Photos app. Onboarding for the first time, the app makes opting out of any of these intentionally confusing, but it is possible.

The company has built ambassador program to drive awareness and installs, too, with payouts to power users who post about the app on other platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Yope said that videos created by these ambassadors have had over 56 million views. The company declined to say how many installs those videos drove, but overall some 70-80% of its users are coming through others inviting them to the app.

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

It is also planning further features. It has yet to launch video, but this is in the works, the company said. Another is a daily check-in trigger that will nudge users to check on their group, and see the photos they have posted, and react to them. The company also wants to make the walls more interactive by allowing users to add stickers, paint doodles, and zoom in/out to see days, months, or years, and to add new formats like vanishing photos with a lock-screen timer.

It also wants to launch a family group format to extend usage of the app beyond its core base of Gen-Z users: currently, the average age of users on the app is 18.

While the focus is on bringing on more users, Yope is also thinking about revenue ideas, starting with subscription plans.

A bumpy road to growth

Yope, the app, may have taken off fairly recently, but Yope the startup has been around for a lot longer, and it initially did not. Founded in 2021 by Ismailau and Paul Rudkouski — who had studied together at Belarusian State University in Minsk — the team worked for years tinkering and looking for a hit.

One app, Salo, was a social networking chat app that billed itself as “the next-gen of discussing things.” (Originally, the startup was called Salo after it.) The duo also built a multi-camera app (similar to BeReal). In 2023, it pivoted to a product for recording asynchronous video podcasts. Then, in September 2024, the company finally made another pivot to create Yope.

The startup has a scattered team in different locations, including New York, Miami, Lisbon, and London (where they have an office). The company said it plans to open an R&D center in future and is scouting for locations.

Yope’s basic hook as a place to share photos and chats in private groups appears to fill a gap in the market.

Yes, you can create groups in WhatsApp and Snapchat. Yes, some have created private group accounts on Instagram. But photo sharing, with a little chat around that, is not really the main use cases for any of these huge apps.

What’s more, Instagram seems to have given up on really doubling down on the idea: Flipside, Instagram’s own attempt to build private groups, was discontinued just five months after it launched.

“Instagram and Snapchat have become platforms for curated content. While Gen Z users take a lot of photos, only 1% of them are shared,” said Ismailau. Yope’s focus, he said, was also very different from Snapchat and Instagram. It is specifically about sharing “unfiltered content,” he added.

There have, in fact, been dozens of others that have tried to build businesses around the idea of sharing in private groups. More recent efforts include Thrive Capital-backed Retro and Marissa Mayer’s Sunshine, but the efforts extend all the way back to Path in 2010.

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

“At Goodwater, we invest in category-defining consumer apps, and Yope is a prime example of an important new social behavior,” Goowater’s co-founder and managing partner, Chi-Hua Chien, told TechCrunch in an email. “Yope is making it easy for everyone to share their daily lives with close friends. Their explosive growth speaks volumes about the strength of their product and team.”

Growth indeed looks good for Yope, but the proof will be in how it manages to sustain that. BeReal (another app that tried to build a private group vibe) had a hot year or two, even inspiring a clone from Meta, before growth rapidly decelerated. (That app was eventually acquired by app and games company Voodoo.)

The team hopes, after a lot of misses in the category — and in its own efforts to build big apps — Yope will become the elusive hit.

“They are working hard,” one VC, who is not backing the startup, told us.