For those who’re something like me, you’ve tried each to-do checklist app and productiveness system, solely to seek out your self giving up earlier than later as a result of earlier than later, managing your productiveness system turns into one other drain in your productiveness. Hoop, a productiveness startup based by a bunch of early Trello staff, desires to make use of AI that can assist you robotically generate and observe your to-do checklist.
The corporate immediately introduced a $5 million seed funding spherical led by Index Ventures, with participation from Origin Ventures, Divergent Capital, and Chingona Ventures.
The core thought behind Hoop is that it’s going to use AI to robotically seize potential duties from Google Meet and Slack conferences and Slack messages (with different platforms coming later, beginning with e mail) and pull these into the Hoop to-do checklist.
The corporate was based by Stella Garber, Brian Schmidt, and Justin Gallagher. Garber, who’s Hoop’s CEO, led advertising at Trello, whereas Gallagher was the primary product particular person at Trello and constructed the corporate’s cellular app, and Schmidt led operations, finance and authorized.
“We were thinking about the next step in our careers and we just really wanted to recapture the magic of the early days of Trello and do it again,” Garber stated. Because the group checked out how the panorama had modified, they realized that now, greater than ever, persons are being bombarded with conferences and messages and wanted a method to observe every little thing they needed to do, however then ended up spending an excessive amount of time managing their productiveness instruments.
“If you started with AI as the starting point for task management, what could you do differently? I think that was a real lightbulb moment for us, because we realize that so many of the existing platforms have to layer in and add AI on top to make their existing things work,” Garber stated. And certainly, an AI bot that joins conferences, transcribes them and takes notes isn’t precisely new at this level, however the Hoop group argues that none of those current platforms concentrate on productiveness and todo lists — and not one of the groups engaged on them have the pedigree of the Hoop founders given their expertise at Trello.
At the moment, Hoop is a little bit of a single-player expertise, however Garber tells me that the corporate plans so as to add extra group options sooner or later. “We are really, really focused on making [Hoop] as useful for the individual as possible before we expand to teams, but it’s a very natural thing for us to do,” Garber stated. And whereas Hoop proper now principally seems to be like a normal to-do checklist, the corporate plans so as to add totally different views over time as effectively.
Along with the institutional traders who participated on this spherical, Hoop additionally introduced on a mixture of angel traders, together with Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier; Job van der Voort, the CEO of Distant; Andy Dunn, the previous CEO of Bonobos; Annie Duke, the primary girl to win the World Sequence of Poker; Maria Katris, the CEO and co-founder of BuiltIn; Maggie Adhami-Boynton, the CEO and co-founder of ShopThing; and Sean Harper, CEO and co-founder of Kin.
