If you’re like me, you’ve tried every to-do list app and productivity system, only to give up sooner rather than later because sooner rather than later, managing your productivity system becomes another burden on your productivity. Hoop, a productivity startup founded by a group of early Trello employees, wants to use AI to help you automatically generate and track your to-do list.
The company today announced a $5 million seed funding round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Origin Ventures, Divergent Capital and Chingona Ventures.
The core idea behind Hoop is that it will use AI to automatically capture potential tasks from Google Meet and Slack meetings and Slack messages (and other platforms will come later, starting with email) and place them on Hoop’s to-do list. .
The company was founded by Estela Garber, Brian Schmidtand Justin Gallagher. Garber, Hoop’s CEO, led marketing at Trello, while Gallagher was Trello’s first head of product, creating the company’s mobile app, and Schmidt led operations, finance and legal.
“We were thinking about the next step in our careers and we really wanted to recapture the magic of the early days of Trello and do it again,” Garber said. As the team looked at how the landscape had changed, they realized that now, more than ever, people are being bombarded with meetings and messages and needed a way to keep track of everything they had to do, but then they ended up spending too much time managing your tasks. productivity tools.
“If you started with AI as a starting point for task management, what could you do differently? “I think it was a real lightbulb moment for us, because we realized that a lot of the existing platforms have to overlap and add artificial intelligence to make existing things work,” Garber said. And in fact, an AI robot that joins meetings, transcribes them, and takes notes isn’t exactly new right now, but Hoop’s team maintains that none of these existing platforms focus on productivity and to-do lists. pending, and none of the teams that work on them. He has the pedigree of Hoop’s founders given his experience at Trello.
Hoop is currently a single-player experience, but Garber tells me the company plans to add more team features in the future. “We are very, very focused on making [Hoop] “As useful as possible for the individual before we expand to teams, but it’s a very natural thing for us,” Garber said. And while Hoop right now looks like a standard to-do list, the company also plans to add different views over time.
In addition to the institutional investors participating in this round, Hoop also had a mix of angel investors, including Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier; Job van der Voort, CEO of Remote; Andy Dunn, former CEO of Bonobos; Annie Duke, the first woman to win the World Series of Poker; Maria Katris, CEO and co-founder of BuiltIn; Maggie Adhami-Boynton, CEO and co-founder of ShopThing; and Sean Harper, CEO and co-founder of Kin.
