Nearly 15 million people have signed up for a social app with no feed to scroll, no likes to chase, and no ads to dodge. Yope is betting that the next era of social belongs to your group chat, not your audience. Let's check them out!
Gen Z takes more photos than any generation in history — and shares almost none of them. Yope's founders say only about 1% of the pictures on a young person's camera roll ever get posted, because the public feed has quietly turned into a stage. Even the people running the big platforms see it: Instagram head Adam Mosseri admits "friends post a lot more to stories and send a lot more DMs than they post to Feed" — Meta now moves 140 billion messages a day — and 55% of people say they post less than they did five years ago. The sharing didn't stop. It just went private.
Enter Yope, a London-based startup building a social network with no algorithmic feed, no likes, and no ads — just small, private "Friendspaces" where close friends and family drop photos, videos, and voice notes that land straight on each other's lock screens. Founded in 2021 by Bahram Ismailau (CEO, who previously co-founded AI startup Peech) and Paul Rudkouski (CTO, ex-Rakuten) — university classmates from Minsk — the company started life as a multi-cam app called Salo, pivoted twice, and ran 100,000+ user interviews before landing on Yope in late 2024. The bet is working: it just raised a $12.3M round led by Northzone — Spotify's early backer — bringing total funding to roughly $20M.
🌐 Website: yope.app
📅 Founded: 2021 (started as "Salo"; relaunched as Yope in Sept 2024)
👥 Founders: Bahram Ismailau (CEO), Paul Rudkouski (CTO)
💰 Stage: $12.3M round led by Northzone (Inovo, Redseed, Geek Ventures) — ~$20M total raised
📈 Traction: ~15M registered users · 10–20M pieces of content shared/week · 500M+ photos & videos shared · 50%+ open the app 5+ days/week
🔮 Tech Trend: Private, algorithm-free "cozy" social
🎯 Target Market: Gen Z and families — real-life close friend groups
🏢 Location: London, UK (distributed team of ~35)
📈 The tailwind is real — and even Meta admits it: The photo-sharing app market is growing from about $5.67B in 2025 toward $7.68B by 2029, but the bigger signal is behavioral: public posting is in retreat while private sharing explodes — Meta reshares roughly a billion Reels through DMs every day. Yope isn't fighting the feed; it's building for where attention already went.
🧩 A space, not a gimmick: Most "authentic social" apps are one-trick — BeReal is a daily prompt, Locket is a home-screen widget. Yope is a persistent private place: customizable profile walls, collage memories, AI-generated recaps, lock-screen widgets, and mini-games launching soon. That depth shows up in the numbers — 50%+ of users open it 5+ days a week, and about 20% have invited an older family member, so it straddles Gen Z and the family-photo crowd in one app.
👫 Founders who kept digging: Ismailau and Rudkouski spent years and two failed products under the same roof before Yope clicked — the kind of stubborn iteration that Northzone's Pär-Jörgen Pärson, an early Spotify backer, bet on when he called Yope "a fresh, empowering and safe take on social media" in contrast to "the predatory practices of Meta, TikTok or X."
The challenge will be making "no ads" pay. Premium subscriptions are the graveyard where plenty of well-meaning social apps have died, and the retention bar is brutal: BeReal soared to ~20M daily users, then nearly halved within months before selling to Voodoo for €500M. And the incumbent is circling — Instagram launched its own disappearing-photo app, "Instants," aimed squarely at this behavior. Yope's edge is that it's a durable network with real habits, not a single feature — but it has to keep 15 million people coming back without the dopamine tricks it swore off.
📱 Download Yope and start a private Friendspace
💼 Join the team — they're hiring and opening a US office
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