Yope raises $12.3M to build a private social network without algorithms or ads

Yope wants you to stop performing for strangers online and just text your actual friends photos, weird ones included. The London-based startup just closed a $12.3 million seed round led by Northzone, the firm behind early bets on Spotify and Klarna, bringing its total funding to $20 million. No ads. No public feed. No algorithm deciding what you see. Just private groups of real friends, sharing whatever they want without worrying about likes.

CEO Bahram Ismailu says the idea came out of more than 100,000 interviews, many conducted with AI tools, digging into how young people actually use social apps in 2024. The finding that stuck: nearly a third of them already keep separate 'spam' accounts, dumping raw, unfiltered photos to a small circle of real-life friends because the main feed feels too public, too curated, too much like a stage. Ismailu's read is that people still want to express themselves, they just don't want to be influencers to do it.

So Yope leans all the way into that. Profiles look less like a polished grid and more like a cluttered wall — photos turned into cut-out stickers, scattered collage-style, closer to a digital Myspace page than an Instagram feed. Soon users will be able to layer in favorite songs, interests, wallpapers, and AI-built mini-games meant to be played with friends rather than alone. Ismailu is careful to draw a line here: Yope isn't using AI to generate content for people, it's using AI to help people actually hang out, whether that's a game, a football-watching recommendation, or eventually helping a group figure out where to meet up in real life.

The numbers suggest this isn't just a nice pitch deck. Yope says it has close to 15 million registered users sharing 10 to 20 million pieces of content a day, and that more than half of its users open the app at least five days a week. Around a fifth of active users have reportedly pulled in an older family member, which is a detail worth sitting with — most new social apps struggle to escape their initial age bracket at all.

This is actually Yope's third act. TechCrunch covered an earlier version of the company before it pivoted, twice, landing on this current format after roughly two years of rebuilding. Northzone partner Pär-Jörgen Pärson framed the pitch bluntly in his statement, contrasting Yope's approach with what he called the predatory practices of Meta, TikTok, and X. The new cash goes toward growing the 35-person team, building out the game features, and opening a US office — the market where the algorithmic feed giants it's trying to dethrone were born.