INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
French startup Yubo has raised a $12.3 million funding round led by Iris Capital and Idinvest Partners
Existing investors Alven, Sweet Capital and Village Global are also participating
platform every day.Yubo is building a social media app for young people under 25 with one focus in particular on helping teenagers meeting
new people and creating friendships
own tiny little community of friends
Yubo wants to become a familiar place where you belong, even if high school sucks for instance.More details in my previous profile of the
company:In addition to meeting new people, you can start conversations and create live video streams to hang out together
Each stream represents a micro-community of people interacting through both video and a live chat.Since 2015, Yubo users have sent each
other 10 billion messages and started 30 million live video streams
Overall, the user base has generated 2 billion friendships.Soon, users will be able to turn on screensharing to show something on their
And at some point in 2020, Yubo should release Yubo Web in order to expand Yubo beyond your smartphone and enable new use cases, such as
Yubo is mostly active in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Nordic countries, Australia and France
Up next, the startup is going to focus on Japan and Brazil
The company plans to hire 35 new people.When it comes to business model, the company started monetizing its app in October 2018 with in-app
purchases to unlock new features
In 2019, the startup has generated $10 million in revenue.Yubo will also use this funding round to improve safety
The company already partners with Yoti for age verification
Users will soon be able to create a blocklist of certain words to customize their experience.In addition to continuous work on flagging
tools and live-stream moderation algorithms in order to detect inappropriate content, the company will also increase the size of its
The company has also put together a safety board with Alex Holmes, Annie Mullins, Travis Bright, Mick Moran, Dr
Richard Graham and Anne Collier.
