📸 Is Yope the New Instagram Competitor Backed by Investors?
A new rapidly-growing photo-sharing app, Yope, was founded by Belarusian entrepreneurs Pavel Rudkovsky and Bahram Ismailau. They now live between London, New York and Miami, and had launched several startups in the past: a multi-camera app and the video platform Salo, from which Yope had pivoted to.
Yope has a simple interface and minimum features. The app key elements: group chats for photo sharing. You can create collages and slideshows from your photos.
Still, Yope positions itself as a "new Instagram". The service was launched in September 2024 and now boasts 800,000 daily active users and 2.2 million monthly users. BlueSky, the competitor to X, took roughly 18 months to build an audience of a similar scale. Even so, Instagram's audience is more than 1.6 billion monthly active users, Snapchat—about 800 million.
The Yope creators believe that people are tired of carefully filtered content in other social networks and prefer to interact with close communities of like-minded people.
"Instagram and Snapchat have become platforms for curated content. While Gen Z users take a lot of photos, only 1% of them are shared. Yope's focus is also very different. It is specifically about sharing 'unfiltered content,'" Ismailau notes.
The average age of Yope users is 18. To attract an older audience, the developers want to add a family group format, video, and more interactive features.
The startup raised $4.7 million in seed funding and is currently valued at $50 million. Investors include several large venture funds and Greg Tkachenko, founder of AI Factory, which was bought by Snapchat for $166 million a few years ago.
➡️ The app is available on Android and iOS—you can test it yourself.
Does Yope have a chance to win over Instagram?
👍 — yes, there isn't anything natural on Instagram anymore!
🎃 — unlikely, sounds boring...
