Ex-Googlers raise $1.25m for text-free social app

Image credit: Yolk

As social media companies like Meta and Snapchat reach giant status, real innovation often takes a backseat to watching what works on rival platforms and then building a similar product.

Thus, social apps that do something different – and find traction or virality while doing it – are often smaller players, such as Bondee or Clubhouse.

One startup aiming to replicate that success is Singapore-based Drigmo with its new app called Yolk.fm, which is looking to go viral for not using text. Instead, the app lets users post images, and then react with AI-generated stickers of their face (or other things).

The company has recently raised US$1.25 million in a pre-seed round led by Forge Ventures and joined by Sequoia’s Scout Fund, as well as partners and investors from DST Global and Temasek. A group of angel investors that include the founders and CEOs of companies like Carro, Carousell, Tableall, and Locofy.ai, also participated.

Co-founder Pieter-Paul Walraven, who calls himself the chief scrambler of Yolk, told Tech in Asia that the team had stumbled into the live sticker format. They noticed a glitch in Apple’s on-device segmentation and parsing tech, which was supposed to create photo cutouts but instead looped a one-second video back and forth.

“When someone in our co-working space approached us and asked what app we were using, we realized, why not make an app out of this bug?” he added.

Founders Walraven, Zihui Chen, and Meiwin Fu are ex-Googlers who are not new to the social app space. Previously, the trio launched an app also called Drigmo, where users can save restaurants they want to try next, share recommendations, and show off what they’ve been ordering.

Drigmo had a viral launch last year, but with Yolk, the team is going relatively lighter in features.

Apart from posting and reacting to snaps, users can add the reactions they receive to a “profile fidget spinner,” a roulette of animated stickers. Friends can also drop reactions to each other’s profile fidget spinner, which the company calls “spinner bombing.”

Initially, the team mulled adding support for text-based chats, thinking it would help retain users. But eventually, the idea was dropped.

“Adding the constraint of having to express yourself through live stickers only felt right with how we approached building Yolk – like it’s a toy,” Walraven said. “That’s when we decided to remove all text.”

Yolk is now available on the Apple App Store. Walraven said his team is using the new capital to test different marketing channels, boost R&D efforts, and occasionally work with part-time remote talent.

Expanding on the last point, Walraven said that for now, Yolk is only a team of three, albeit with complementary skills. They are also running Drigmo concurrently, thus pursuing a multi-app strategy.