Life Before Us LLC, a Delaware corporation based in San Francisco, has raised $1.5 million valuing the company at $10 million. The social networking application allows users to send push notification to their friends containing the simple message “yo.” The message cannot be customized.

Company CEO and co-founder Or Abel, Stanford graduate, created and coded the application in just eight hours. The idea was developed when Arbel’s boss at the image-sharing application Mobli, Moshe Hogeg, asked him to find a way to communicate with his assistant with just the touch of a button. No texting no calling. Arbel noticed that all the conversations he had with his friends using the popular application WhatsApp used the world “yo.”

Yo Co-Founders Arbel (center) & Hogeg (right)

Arbel decided to create and code an application that users can communicate through without having to type. Arbel stated: “It’s lightweight and you don’t have to read the notification … you can choose to ignore it and there’s nothing to open.”

Apple first refused to host the yo application in the App Store assuming the application was incomplete. As a result Arbel and Hogeg registered the application under a fake corporate name “Life Before Us LLC” to see how the application would be perceived by the public.

Since the application first launched on April Fool’s Day the San Francisco based startup has been downloaded over 2 million times with users sending more than 2 million “yos” a day. In the first four days of its release, the yo application already had 1 million users. The company currently operates with only 3 employees, two of which are Arbel and Hogeg.

Hogeg said: ” A lot of time, you don’t need anything more than ‘yo to explain what you want or need.” He can send a “yo” to his wife when he is leaving the office and she will send a “yo” when dinner is ready. His children, he says, send a “yo” when they’re ready to be picked up from wherever they are.

To date, the Yo application has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Hogeg. Venture-capital firms and tech leaders such as Tencent, China’s largest Internet portal, and Mashable CEO and founder Pete Cashmore are a few of many notable investors who have contributed to the funding.

Even with its popularity, the yo application still received a lot of criticism for being useless and “gimmicky.’ Now, the application has a very useful purpose. It is being used to save lives in the Middle East.

Red Alert, an application launched by founders concerned that some Israeli citizens would not be able to hear official army sirens, is an application that sends a message 15-30 seconds before a missile strikes. A message generated by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) works with Red Alert and Yo’s push notifications to warn a large scale of citizens vulnerable to missile strikes.

Red Alert (left) and Yo (right)

Yo is becoming one of Israel’s most popular apps with citizens relying on its warnings to avoid rocket strikes.

Israeli native Arbel “didn’t anticipate the situation going right now in Israel” but has publicized his application for collaboration with Red Alert. “This is exactly the reason we made our platform public. Let smart people use it in a lot of different ways.”

Topics: Apps, Delaware, Small Business, Startups