As early executives at Trello, we’ve long evangelized distributed teams and flexible work practices. But the very platforms that facilitate knowledge work today can likewise detract from it: constant pings across tools can make it feel impossible to maintain focus or keep your finger on the pulse of what actually needs to get done.
Fortunately, AI presents an opportunity to tackle this problem in a new way.
Today, we’re proud to announce our $5M seed round.
Over the years, we’ve seen firsthand how productivity tools are often only as effective as the people using them. The onus is usually on the individual to keep track of everything; keeping track of work becomes work in and of itself. But a sheet of paper (or a simple doc) can no longer be sufficient in an era where requests can come from anywhere — all the time. And when it takes more than 23 minutes to regain focus after a disruption, this onslaught of distractions can be the difference between a completed to-do list — or one still begging for attention at every turn.
When we started Hoop in 2022, we wanted to bring our work full circle, and back to that vision of harmonious distributed teams. We’d helped pioneer this in our work at Trello, and were proud to see the principles adopted by the much-larger Atlassian when it acquired Trello in 2017. We saw an opportunity to take the learning we’d had building Trello and apply it both in building a new company, and also to build new tools that are AI native and approach the age old problem of, “How do I keep track of my work?”
Early users have called Hoop a “lifesaver” and “magical.” Abby, a Senior Product Manager said, “Hoop not only saves me the time of consolidating all those scattered notes, but it also captures the context for each task. No more racking my brain days later trying to figure out what a cryptic note actually meant. Plus, if anything gets fuzzy, I can even grab the full transcript from the meeting…. Overall, Hoop has saved me countless hours and made my workflow so much smoother.”
Our vision for Hoop is to build the next generation of task management that helps humans focus more on creativity and focus work, and leave the rote and repetitive actions to the robots. We are excited by the green space to build an AI native project management platform, especially at a time when there is so much possibility with AI.
Our funding was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Origin Ventures, Divergent Capital, and Chingona Ventures. We prioritized a diverse cap table, reflecting our belief that products should mirror the societies they serve. More than half of Hoop’s investors are women, people of color, or both. We're so grateful for the support from our angel investors during this journey including:
- Every member of the early Trello leadership team:
- Michael Pryor, Co-founder/CEO
- Liz Hall, CPO at Splash
- Kristen Habacht, CRO at Typeform
- Barry Clark, former VP of Engineering at Trello
- Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier
- Job van der Voort, CEO of Remote
- Jay Simons, former President of Atlassian
- Andy Dunn, former CEO of Bonobos
- Maggie Adhami-Boynton, CEO/Co-founder of ShopThing
- Sean Harper, CEO/Co-founder of Kin
- Nikita Miller, SVP Product at The Knot
- Linda Lian, Co-founder/CEO of Common Room
- Mihika Kapoor, Senior PM at Figma
- Maria Katris, Co-founder/CEO of Built In
- Darren Murph, former Head of Remote at Gitlab
- Jiaona Zhang, CPO at LinkTree
More and more companies are realizing that the digital office is here to stay. We lived this for years at Trello, and we're excited to help bring more best practices mainstream. We’re so appreciative to our early backers and users for their confidence in our vision for a better way of working. See for yourself by trying Hoop, and let us know what you think via email, LinkedIn, or Twitter.