4 days after launch and $100M valuation for social network Poparazzi

At the beginning of the year, the venture capital market was discussing the Clubhouse precedent: an audio social network at the beta stage received a valuation of $100M and, before its first profit, began to claim unicorn status. Apparently, 2021 is the year when venture capital records are broken every month because there is a new hero on the “scene” of a rapid rise in valuation.

American Forbes shares data from its sources, which suggests that the new social network Poparazzi is preparing to raise $15–20M from the Benchmark Capital fund at a valuation of $100M. The only thing is that the application has been running for only 4 days! The first of which, of course, ended up at the top of the US App Store, but still the figures are record-breaking. The initial boom in user engagement was given by the promotion on the TikTok platform, which generated a waiting list of 500 000 people.

The idea behind the app is to register in reverse. Users upload photos of their friends but not themselves to the app, and the platform then generates pages from multiple sources. The result is an “honest” profile of your friends’ authorship, and this “honesty” is part of the project’s philosophy against edited photos.

Benchmark Capital is known for its investments in the likes of Snap, Twitter and Uber. According to one source, the fund is willing to invest $13.5M for 10% of the company. Both the fund and the funders declined to comment officially on the matter.