Tech
Yope raises $12.3M to build a private social network without algorithms or ads
As social media has evolved from a place to connect with friends into large-scale entertainment platforms, a startup called Yope is quietly building what it believes will be the future of online connection: social networking with no algorithms, no ads, and no public content.
Yope’s app, now backed by a $12.3 million round led by Northzone, is taking on tech giants like Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram by building a social platform centered on what it refers to as “micro communities” — or small groups where friends and family interact in private, sharing photos, videos, messages, and soon, playing games.
The idea of building algorithm-free, private social media is not new, but few apps have managed to scale without the addition of creator content to keep users engaged. Yope hopes to change that by encouraging connections between real-world friends, making it as much a communication tool as a place to share photos or life updates.
On Yope, accounts are private by default, and there’s no algorithmic feed. It’s also not supported by advertising, instead focusing on developing a premium, subscription-based experience for power users.
Bahram Ismailau, Yope’s London-based co-founder and CEO, says the team saw the potential for a new type of social network after conducting over 100,000 interviews — aided by AI tools — to better understand how young people around the world were using social networks. They found that around 30% were using what are often called photo dump or “spam” accounts, where users share more candid photos with a smaller group of real-life friends.
Meanwhile, many people don’t share anything publicly, relying instead on messaging to keep up with friends.
“[Young people] don’t have any place to self-express if they are not ready to be an influencer,” Ismailau pointed out in an interview with TechCrunch. Yet teens still want to do so; they just want more privacy.
“We found this big opportunity to create a new space for young people to be social. We called it Yope, and it’s an AI-native social platform for young people and the next generation.”
He clarified that the team doesn’t believe in using AI to create content; rather, it sees AI as a tool that can help create better connections. That includes using AI to create mini-games that you can play with your friends, a feature expected to launch in about a month. It also aims to leverage AI to help users meet up in real life, perhaps by buying tickets to an event, or finding a restaurant or bar where they can watch a football game.
On Yope, users create their own profiles by sharing photos, which can be turned into cut-out stickers. Instead of being organized into albums, the photos are displayed in a collage-like, almost chaotic arrangement across each user’s “wall.” Soon, Yope users will be able to further customize their space by adding their interests, favorite music, and the mini-games, as well as customizing the look and feel with colors and wallpapers of their choosing.
The idea recalls Myspace, where users once carved out their own place on the web, and customized it to reflect their personalities.
The app also heavily borrows from existing social platforms, offering what are now-standard features like in-app messaging, recaps of top moments (Yope’s are created by AI), and lock screen widgets that showcase your friends’ photos. During onboarding, the app walks users through setting up its various features and granting the permissions it needs to access their photos and find their friends, encouraging them to add connections and start private chats.
The combination of features appears to be working — Yope now has nearly 15 million registered users, who have collectively shared between 10 million and 20 million pieces of content weekly, including individual photos, videos, or stickers. Those metrics suggest regular use. Ismailau claims more than 50% of Yope’s users open the app at least five days per week, essentially making them power users.
And it’s not just young people adding their friends. Ismailau says around 20% of active users have invited an older family member to join them on the app.
The usage attracted investor attention, Ismailau says, as Northzone approached the company, not the other way around. Northzone, which has backed other consumer apps like Spotify and Klarna, led the $12.3 million round, with participation from Inovo, Redseed, and Geek Ventures. The round brings the company’s total funding to $20 million. (Yope is the result of two prior pivots — TechCrunch covered an earlier version of the company. The current version has been in development for roughly two years.)
“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,” said Pär-Jörgen Pärson, partner at Northzone, in a statement. “We are very excited to partner with Bahram, Paul [Rudkouski, co-founder] and their team to build the service far beyond the current millions of users and half a billion moments shared.”
The funding will be used to further develop the product, grow the team — now around 35 people — and establish an office in the United States.
Yope is a free download on iOS and Android.
Correction: Users are exchanging 10 to 20 million pieces of content weekly, not daily; the founder misspoke. We have updated the post accordingly.
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Tech
Passionfroot raises $15M to expand its B2B creator marketplace to the US
Passionfroot, a German startup building a marketplace connecting B2B creators with brands, said on Wednesday it has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners.
Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners, said Passionfroot is placed well at a time when creators are specializing as AI companies look for more visibility.
“Passionfroot has the perfect dynamics on both sides to warrant a true marketplace for B2B creators. On the demand side, there is increasing consumerization of the way B2B brands go to market. That’s a product of, in part, AI technology requiring evangelism, narrative building, and education. On the supply side, there are people who have real expertise, understand a market deeply, and want to create quality content,” she told TechCrunch over a call.
With the funding, the Berlin-based startup’s co-founder and CEO, Jen Phan, is moving to New York, where Passionfroot is opening an office to expand its U.S. operations. The company is also opening an office in São Paulo, and expanding its current headcount of 15 employees.
As AI makes it easier to build products, companies are focusing on using creators to improve brand recall and recognition, Phan said.
“Every head of marketing or growth leader I’m talking to is saying really the same thing: AI is commoditizing software and flooding every category with new products, features, and launches. It’s incredibly crowded and noisy. That is why B2B buyers are going to channels like LinkedIn, a creator’s Substack, or a podcast on YouTube to discover new products and tools,” she said.
Phan said over the last year, the company increased its revenue by 13 times, and onboarded clients such as ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer, and Gamma.
Since its last fundraise in 2024, the company has released an AI agent called Zest, which helps brands create, execute and monitor the performance of campaigns. Passionfruit claims Zest can also help companies find suitable creators both inside and outside the platform that are suited to its marketing strategy.
The startup says it uses a proprietary creator graph based on data about reach and performance from thousands of campaigns. There’s also a wallet that companies can use to pay creators across the globe, and measure their expenditure.
Passionfroot claims it has paid at least $10 million to creators on its platform in the last 18 months.
The company says it is working on helping its clients measure how a campaign is impacting AI citations, and how their brand appears in AI-powered answers. The startup is also planning to build AI features for creators, such as helping them with monetization tips and content ideas.
The funding comes as creator platforms like Substack and Beehiiv move to help creators find better monetization opportunities. Beehiiv launched a new community and ad marketplace last week, and Substack has introduced subscriber-only perks within newsletters.
Passionfroot’s Series A also saw participation from existing investors Creandum, Supernode Global, and s16vc. The company has raised more than $21 million so far.
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Tech
Cascade raises $3.5M to help construction firms find and win projects
Cascade, a startup building a platform to help architecture, engineering, and construction firms find and win projects, has raised a $3.5 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun, Ada Ventures, and Snowball VC.
Launched in 2025, Cascade is a result of its founders, Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira, witnessing firsthand the difficulty construction businesses face with predictably securing work.
“My mother worked in a company that sold materials to construction companies, and my uncle built mansions in the Middle East. They’re incredible at their craft but just don’t have access to the right tools to get more work,” Ferreira told TechCrunch. And Zia recalled the time her father tried starting a construction business back in her native Pakistan: “He just couldn’t get enough projects to sustain himself.”
Zia describes the current process of finding construction projects as a “constant treasure hunt,” with firms having to log into each U.S. state, city, district, county, and federal agency’s portals. “So if you’re really good at building suspension bridges, you have to find all of those opportunities across these disparate portals.”
Cascade aims to help architecture, construction, and engineering firms on this front by tracking ongoing and upcoming projects, and then using prior tender data to predict which developers are likely to win the deals.
Here’s how the platform works: A company signs up to the platform, and then Cascade uses AI tools to determine which projects they have the best chance of winning. It also predicts what projects are coming up, using different signals and data points across U.S. states, local districts, private contracts, and federal agencies. For example, if a state announces a $100 million affordable housing grant, Cascade will monitor which developers won the grant the last time it was announced.
“We connect that data, and we tell our customers: ‘Most likely one of these five developers will win this newly announced grant, so go start talking to them to win projects,’” Ferreira explained.
The duo applied to a16z’s Speedrun last September. They said the pressure to do well on demo day and being around the “brilliance” of other founders helped the company sign contracts with firms that have built the JFK and La Guardia airports, Four Seasons hotels, and some data centers. “Speedrun gave us visibility and a stamp of approval to close big deals,” Zia said.
The startup will use the fresh cash to go to market, host industry events, and hire more engineers.
Other startups in this area include GovWin IQ and ConstructConnect, but Ferreira argues Cascade is a bit more AI-native than these platforms.
“Every time a customer wins a bid, they give feedback, so the system keeps getting smarter. Over time, we’ll have a complete map of the industry that our AI can traverse to predict the best projects and leads for each customer,” she said.
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Tech
If you pay a hacker’s ransom, chances are that they’ll come back for more
Governments have long warned not to pay a hacker’s ransom demands, arguing that doing so only lets criminals profit from their cyberattacks and funds the next one. There’s also another reason: The hackers are unlikely to leave you alone if you pay up once, and many will come back demanding more.
In a report published Wednesday, cybersecurity giant Proofpoint said it surveyed 953 companies and found that over one-third of companies that paid a hacker’s ransom were hit with a second extortion demand. The findings underscore the long-held understanding among security researchers and network defenders that it’s impossible to negotiate in good faith with an extortion racket because there’s no incentive for the other side to actually walk away.
Proofpoint’s data shows that ransomware attacks and extortion attacks have evolved from a single transaction where hackers would get paid once and move on, into an effort using multiple forms of leverage, such as retaining stolen data under the threat of publicly releasing it.
While hackers have claimed in the past that they will delete or destroy the victim’s stolen data, past incidents have shown that not to be the case.
Last month, a hack at market research firm Klue exposed data belonging to its customers, including several cybersecurity firms. The company said it struck a deal with the hackers, who claimed to have deleted the data, but the company later conceded that a separate hacking group swiped a sample of the company’s stolen data, leaving its customers exposed to potential future extortion demands.
A similar situation befell Change Healthcare in 2024, after a Russian-speaking ransomware gang stole the health and medical data of the majority of people in America, some 192 million people. Amid a dispute between the hackers and their affiliates (criminal groups often subcontract out attacks), Change Healthcare paid separate ransoms to both groups of criminals to keep the sensitive medical data off of the internet.
Security researchers have long suspected that ransomware gangs and extortion rackets will keep hold of the victim’s stolen data, even after a payment is made. U.K. law enforcement confirmed this during their takedown efforts targeting the prolific LockBit ransomware gang in 2024. Police said that they found victims’ stolen data stored on LockBit’s servers long after they had paid the ransom.
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