Yo Still Kicking With More Than 100M Yos Sent, Roughly 15 Per Second

The end is nigh for the tech industry?

Butler startups?

Yo?

The funding round that launched a thousand aggravated blog posts about the merits or idiocy of an app that lets you send just a single word over and over via push notification is still supporting a living, breathing and perhaps even, thriving, startup.

“It’s amazing if I compare it to other companies,” said Moshe Hogeg, Yo’s co-founder. “Every second, there are 14 or 15 Yos sent. That’s three months after all the big hype.”

While that rate is down from a peak over the summer when as many as 100 were sent per second, it doesn’t feel like a trough of sorrow. Hogeg said the app has about 1.5 million monthly active users, which appears to be slightly up from a month or so ago. Hogeg, who also co-founded a photo-sharing app Mobli, has proven to be extremely talented at going around traditional Silicon Valley venture capital funding sources and tapping billionaires like Carlos Slim for financing.

Hogeg continued to defend the concept behind the app, which was designed when he originally wanted a way to easily dial up his assistant or let his wife know that he was thinking about her.

“Sometimes it’s enough to look at someone and know exactly what they mean,” he said. “Yo is also a word that means nothing. The context brings the meaning. Because ‘Yo’ means nothing, it could mean anything. It’s stupid but it’s beautiful at the same time.”

He was also very excited about the possibilities of Yo on Apple’s new watch.

“That could be a whole a new way to communicate,” he said. “That’s Yo. We created it.”