Spotify’s initial backer leads $12.3M round for Yope to build a private alternative to Snapchat — TFN

• Pär-Jörgen Pärson, a partner at Northzone and Spotify’s first investor, has led a $12.3 million pre-Series A round for Yope, a private photo app for friends.
• With this round, Yope’s total funding reaches $20 million. The app has gained 14 million users and enabled the sharing of half a billion photos and videos, all without paid marketing.
• Yope’s data shows that one in three Snapchat users would leave if their memories weren’t stored there. Yope wants to solve this problem.

Yope, a private photo and video sharing app from London, raised $12.3 million in a pre-Series A round led by Northzone, with Inovo, Redseed, and Geek Ventures also joining. This brings its total funding to $20 million. Northzone’s Pär-Jörgen Pärson, Spotify’s first outside investor, is known for backing consumer apps early, before they become mainstream.

A Spotify-level belief, used in a new way

Pärson led Northzone’s early investment in Spotify when the company had just 23 employees and no live product, even though there was little support internally. He later backed Northzone’s $1.2 billion tenth fund and invested in companies like Reonic, seen as possible successors to Spotify.

Along with his wife, Annika Sten Pärson, he pledged $100 million over 20 years to their mental health foundation and sits on the board of Spring Health, a mental health startup valued at $2 billion.

“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. We are very excited to partner with Bahram, Paul and their team to build the service far beyond the current millions of users and half a billion moments shared,” says Pärson.

A retention challenge in plain sight

Mordor Intelligence predicts the social networking market will grow from about $210 billion in 2026 to over $411 billion by 2031. Growth is divided between public platforms that focus on attention and smaller private spaces that users prefer.

Yope’s survey of more than 10,000 US users found that one in three want to leave Snapchat but stay because their memories are stored there. This shows a retention problem caused by data lock-in, not habit or network size.

Yope was founded in London in 2021 by Bahram Ismailau and Paul Rudkouski. The app focuses on what the founders call “Friendspace,” which means small, real-life groups of friends and family instead of public feeds. Users decide who can see their moments. AI creates personalised recaps, giving each group a private, curated archive. For example, five friends on a weekend trip get an automatic recap that only they can see.

“Social media stopped being social. It turned into media built to hold your attention and sell it. It made this the loneliest generation yet. Young people don’t need a bigger audience, they need a private place for the friends who actually matter. Our mission is to help them build healthier social lives, rooted in real friendships rather than performance,” says Rudkouski.

Why Yope thinks it does better than BeReal and Locket

This approach makes Yope different from its main competitors in the private social space.

BeReal focused on a daily photo prompt and was bought by Voodoo for $537 million in 2024 after raising $90 million. Locket focused on lock-screen photo widgets and has raised $12.5 million so far. Neither tackled the Snapchat data lock-in problem.

Yope wants to be the trusted place for storing friendship memories, so users are less likely to leave. BeReal’s experience shows the risk: its daily active users have stayed flat since Voodoo bought it, which suggests that just being authentic may not be enough for long-term growth.

Yope’s organic growth backs this up. The company says it has over 14 million users and more than half a billion shared photos and videos, all without spending on marketing. In Australia, where social media is banned for users under 16, Yope was allowed and briefly topped the App Store charts, gaining over 100,000 organic downloads.

“We believe the future of social is active participation, powered by AI. Our AI agents turn the moments close friends share into personalised, gamified experiences. The same way Roblox and Minecraft became social worlds for hundreds of millions of young people, we can make real-life communication feel playful, alive, and deeply personal. This is already in active development, and we expect to bring the first version to users over the next few months,” adds Ismailau.

The new funding will help Yope double its team and build more AI-powered, gamified features. The main question is whether giving users a place to store their memories will keep them coming back, or if Yope will end up like the platforms it wants to replace once it starts making money from its 14 million users.