Yik Yak, the US-based anonymous social media app that raised $73.5m from backers including social media group Renren, is shutting down this week, according to a blog post by its co-founders.
Founded in 2013, Yik Yak built a university campus-based app that acted as an anonymous online community message board. It grew quickly and secured $62m in a November 2014 series B round led by Sequoia Capital that valued it at between $300m and $400m.
Renren had contributed to a $10m series A round just four months earlier which was led by DCM Ventures and backed by Azure Capital Partners and angel investor Tim Draper, after Yik Yak had raised $1.5m in a 2013 seed round featuring DCM, Vaizra Investments and Atlanta Ventures.
However, the platform fell prey to some of the same problems as fellow anonymous blogging services like Secret and Whisper, attracting negative publicity due to the inflammatory content posted by some of its users.
An attempt to introduce identity handles for users proved unpopular, as did revelations that users’ identities were not anonymous to authority figures.
Perhaps more damagingly, unlike Facebook, Yik Yak could never leverage its campus popularity into the world at large and its user numbers regularly dropped between terms before a rapid decrease in the number of downloads in 2016 helped to seal its fate.
A regulatory filing has indicated that mobile payment platform Square had paid $1m to take on some of Yik Yak’s engineering team as well as a non-exclusive licence for part of its intellectual property.
However, The Verge reported in February this year that co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington were already working on a new project, a campus-focused group messaging platform called Hive, though no further details concerning Hive have since been released.