Hoop, a to-do list that updates itself, announced $5 million in seed funding, led by Index Ventures, with participation from Origin Ventures, Divergent Capital, and Chingona Ventures. The company’s team (who met as early employees at Trello) will use the funding to deepen Hoop’s AI capabilities, expand its platform integrations, and develop collaborative features. Hoop is currently available to individuals, but will soon launch a version for teams.
Hoop was the brainchild of 3 former Trello executives: Stella Garber, Brian Schmidt, and Justin Gallagher. And Trello was one of the most successful project management tools in history, and Hoop’s founding team members were early pioneers in remote work, developing practices that lived on when Atlassian acquired Trello in 2017.
They launched Hoop in 2022 with a vision for a more sustainable way of working, one that was free from the distractions that plague digital work. And by automatically aggregating tasks from platforms like Google Meet, Slack, Zoom, and email into one place, Hoop’s auto-capturing AI creates a to-do list that updates itself. In contrast to the surge of AI platforms that join meetings to offer seas of transcriptions, Hoop recognizes and helps prioritize tasks so attendees can stay present and responsive rather than jotting down action items.
The Hoop team prioritized a diverse cap table for its seed round, reflecting their belief that products should mirror the societies they serve. Over half of the company’s investors are women, people of color, or both. The investors include every member of the early Trello leadership team; Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier; Job van der Voort, CEO of Remote; and Andy Dunn, former CEO of Bonobos; Annie Duke, the first woman to win the World Series of Poker; Maria Katris, CEO/Co-founder of BuiltIn; Maggie Adhami-Boynton, CEO/Co-founder of ShopThing; Jay Simons, former President of Atlassian; and Sean Harper, CEO/Co-founder of Kin.
KEY QUOTES:
“Teams increasingly work across multiple — sometimes dozens — of tools. While these technologies foster remote work, they’ve also contributed to a feeling that work is everywhere and anywhere. Keeping track of all it only creates more work, not to mention that nagging feeling that you missed something. We built Hoop to make it easier to get work done, giving people the confidence that they can go about their workday knowing the important stuff is being tracked, without having to play notification whack-a-mole across all their tools.”
- Stella Garber, co-founder of Hoop
“As companies battle to do more with less, workers are clearly more stressed and exhausted than ever. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Hoop on this journey, and we are already experiencing the benefits from using Hoop’s technology ourselves.”
- Neil Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures who led the investment
