Image: TechCrunch
Yope, a Kyiv-based startup founded by Belarusians Bahram Ismailau and Pavel Rudkovsky, has announced an initial seed-round investment of $4.65 million. The startup is currently valued at $50 million.
Investment details
The round is led by the American venture capital firm Goodwater Capital, with Polish Inovo VC also participating.
The round was joined by Redseed, a venture capital firm founded by russian Ilya Shirokov (president of Odnoklassniki from 2010 to 2016) and Mail.ru Group co-founder Gregory Finger, who, according to his Marketscreener profile, lived in Moscow until at least 2005.
According to Russian Forbes, in 1999, Figner, together with Yuri Milner and NCH Advisors, created the netBridge firm, which later invested in Mail.ru. At the same time, Redseed is stated to be a British VC firm. According to Shirokov's Linkedin profile, he lives in Lisbon, while according to Crunchbase he is currently based in Riga.
In addition, business angels have invested in the startup at this stage: Frenchman Jean de La Rochebrochard and Reface co-founder Dmitry Shvets. Other angels that invested include Greg Tkachenko, one of the co-founders of AI Factory, which was acquired by Snapchat in 2020. In 2013, Tkachenko worked at Yandex for two years, in 2016-2017 he lectured at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and was nominated for 30 under 30 by Russian Forbes.
The last angel investor at this stage is Andrei Tkachenko, a former Google researcher and Belarusian who now works for Ethflow, a Polish-based company that was allegedly founded by Belarusians who came from Yandex.
"Yope is growing fast — 30x growth in just six months, hitting 2M MAU (Monthly Active Users — ed.) with only $5K/month in marketing spend. I’m proud of the team and the result - but we’re just getting started," writes Yope co-founder Bahram Ismailau.
About Yope
Yope (formerly Salo) is a mobile application that records real-time video of the user and their interaction with any content on their smartphone and the world around them. It offers a way for users to simultaneously record themselves and everything they see on their smartphone, and then send a single video to any messenger or social network. A TechCrunch source calls Yope "the new Instagram."
In May 2022, Yope raised $2 million from a number of funds: Horizon Capital, TA Ventures, iClub, Kolos Ventures, hi5 Ventures, Geek Ventures, Vesna Ventures, and a former Google executive. In September 2021, the startup raised a pre-seed round of $600,000. The lead investor was Ukrainian venture fund Adventures Lab.
