Board, the three-year-old, Recent York-based startup constructing what it calls “together tech” — tech designed to bring people physically into the identical room — has closed a $20 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures.
General Partner Michael Mignano, in his first investment since joining USV, will join the corporate’s board of directors. The round also brought in some famous angel investors including Biz Stone, Tim Ferriss, and Scott Belsky.
The raise comes about eight months after founder Brynn Putnam — who previously sold connected fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million — unveiled Board publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt last October.
The Board device is a 24-inch touchscreen in a wood-finish frame that uses proprietary technology to acknowledge physical game pieces, mixing the tactile feel of board games with the interactivity of video games.
Traction since launch has been strong, the corporate says: Board is now in tens of 1000’s of homes, schools, hospitals, and restaurants across all 50 states, with 85% of shoppers averaging 30 or more play sessions per 30 days.
Alongside the funding, Board announced Board Studio, an AI-powered creation platform launching later this 12 months that can let anyone construct original games using natural language prompts — from idea to playable prototype in under an hour, it says.
Board had previously raised $15 million in funding led by the enterprise firm Lerer Hippeau, which had also led Mirror’s $3 million seed round years earlier. That was a bet that paid off handsomely when Putnam sold the connected fitness company to Lululemon in 2020.
Putnam sees Board as a natural extension of what she learned about consumer hardware while constructing Mirror. “Mirror was very much about me,” she once told TechCrunch. “It was my reflection, my performance, it was about making your personal self higher. At that next phase, my life was really just rather more about my family and my friends and my relationships.”
The result’s a product built around the straightforward but increasingly popular concept that the perfect use of tech may be to get people to place their devices down and look one another within the face.
The raise arrives at a moment when consumer tech, long out of favor with investors, is showing signs of bouncing back, driven largely by what AI is making newly possible.
“I’m more enthusiastic about consumer than I’ve been in an extended time,” said Ben Lerer, managing partner of Lerer Hippeau, late last 12 months during a separate sit-down with TechCrunch. “We’re seeing a really high-quality group of founders saying, ‘Now’s the time to get back within the pool.’ There are things which can be possible today that weren’t possible six months ago or a 12 months ago, and the slope is steep.”
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