If you're like me, you've tried every to-do list app and productivity system out there. But sooner or later, you end up giving up because managing your productivity system leads to even less productivity. Hoop, a productivity startup founded by a group of early Trello employees, wants to use AI to automatically generate and track to-do lists.
The company today announced a $5 million seed round of funding led by Index Ventures, with participation from Origin Ventures, Divergent Capital and Chingona Ventures.
Image credit: Hoop
The basic idea behind Hoop is that it uses AI to automatically grab potential tasks from Google Meet, Slack meetings, and Slack messages (starting with email, with other platforms coming later) and pull them into a Hoop to-do list.
The company was founded by Stella Gerber, Brian Schmidt, and Justin Gallagher. Gerber, who is now CEO of Hoop, previously ran marketing at Trello, Gallagher was Trello's first product lead, developing the company's mobile apps, and Schmidt ran operations, finance, and legal affairs.
“We were thinking about the next step in our careers, and we wanted to recapture the magic of those early days of Trello and do that again,” says Gerber. As the team observed the situation change, people were in more meetings and messaging than ever before and needed a way to keep track of everything they had to do, but they ended up realizing that managing their productivity tools was taking up too much time.
“If we were to start with AI as a starting point for task management, what would be different? I think that was a real lightbulb moment for us, because we realized that a lot of the existing platforms had to layer on AI to make what they already had work,” Gerber said. Sure, an AI bot that joins meetings, transcribes them, and takes notes isn't exactly new at this point, but the Hoop team argues that none of these existing platforms are focused on productivity and to-do lists, and none of the teams working on them have the backgrounds that Hoop's founders have, given their experience at Trello.
Currently, Hoop is a single-player experience, but Gerber said he plans to add team functionality in the future. [Hoop] “We want to make it as useful as possible for individuals before expanding it to teams, that's just a natural fit for us,” Gerber said. And while for now Hoop looks like a standard to-do list, the company plans to add different views over time.
In addition to the institutional investors who participated in the round, Hoop also welcomed a variety 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.