Kyiv-based startup Yope raises $2M

The Kyiv-based startup Yope (previously called Salo), founded by Belarusians Bakhram Ismailov and Pavlo Rudkovskyi, has raised $2 million from several funds, as reported to AIN.Capital by hi5 Ventures.

• According to the fund hi5 Ventures, which became one of the investors in this round, the terms of the deal are not disclosed. But over the past six months, the company’s valuation has increased six-fold.
• It is a bridge round, an interim financing round between the pre-seed round six months ago and the seed round planned for this fall.
• Funds involved in the deal include Horizon Capital, TA Ventures, iClub, Kolos Ventures, hi5 Ventures, Geek Ventures, Vesna VC, and a former Google executive.
• The startup’s team now consists of 21 employees, including people from Viber, Flo, Epam, EY, iTechArt, and other companies. The startup has an office in Kyiv, but after the start of a full-scale war, the management began evacuating employees to other countries in Europe.
• Yope’s product, a mobile video app, has gained over 100,000 users from the US and South America during the first four months of beta-testing. 
• The funds raised will help the team conduct a full-fledged project launch and hire more developers.

In September 2021, the startup Salo raised a $600,000 pre-seed round. At that time, the lead investor was the Ukrainian venture capital fund Adventures Lab.

Yope is an app for real-time recording videos of users and their interaction with any content. They can record themselves and their smartphone screens and share it as a single video via messengers or social media.