Why We Invested in Hoop
We are excited to share that Hoop has emerged out of stealth mode and raised $5M in seed funding led by Index Ventures with participation from Chingona Ventures, Origin Ventures, and Divergent Capital. Hoop is an AI powered to-do list that writes itself by connecting to tools like Slack, email, and virtual meetings and automatically capturing tasks.
The Story Behind Hoop
Hoop is led by CEO Stella Garber, COO Brian Schmidt, and CPO Justin Gallagher. The trio met as early executives at Trello — one of the most successful project management tools in history — and continued working together at Atlassian following its $425M acquisition of Trello in 2017. Five years later, in 2022, the team embarked on founding Hoop with a vision to build a more sustainable way of working following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hoop’s CEO, Stella, has been a long-time advocate of remote work environments, even before their widespread adoption during and following the pandemic. However, she, alongside her co-founders, realized that the numerous technological tools that enable this virtual “Future of Work’’ can often detract from it — leaving people feeling inundated with information that can become confusing or even distracting.
As Stella explained to Business Wire, “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.”
This fueled the idea behind Hoop.
“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,” she remarked.
Hoop’s auto-capturing AI aggregates tasks mentioned within collaboration platforms like Google Meet, Slack, and Zoom in one place, creating a to-do list that writes itself. By integrating with tools that businesses already use today, Hoop’s solution avoids contributing to the current tool fatigue. While many other AI-powered platforms or bots simply join virtual meetings and provide a call transcript or summary, Hoop instead orients its users around action items that come from these conversations. The platform aims to give users the confidence that everything they need is in one place with no task slipping through the cracks.
Why We Invested
Prior to her time at Atlassian and Trello, Stella was a founding employee of FeeFighters — a venture-backed payments startup acquired by Groupon in 2012 — and later served as CEO and co-founder of Matchist, a site connecting businesses with top web and mobile developers. She has also written checks as an angel investor, with early investments in 30+ companies including Kin, CoLab, Writer, Tovala, OnBrand, Magic, and soona. She is also a longtime friend and Senior Advisor to Chingona Ventures.
It is safe to say that when Stella shared her latest endeavor with us, we were immediately excited about Hoop given her strong background as an entrepreneur, operator, and investor and particular expertise in building workforce productivity tools. When we invested in Hoop, the company was pre-product and pre-revenue.
Since our investment — following hundreds of customer discovery calls and several product iterations — the company has fully built and launched its AI-powered task manager. At Chingona Ventures, we were thrilled to be among one of the first groups of beta users before its official launch, testing out new features and providing feedback to the Hoop team. We saw this as a win-win because we were some of the first people to experience the “magic” of Hoop — having a to-do list that writes itself, allowing us to work better and faster.
While Hoop is currently able to auto-aggregate tasks from virtual meetings and Slack conversations, the company also recently launched an email feature, allowing users to forward to-dos located within email correspondence to their Hoop task list. The team plans to roll out additional integrations in the near future.
We continue to be excited about Hoop’s application of AI to transform task management. Hoop aligns with Chingona Ventures’ investment thesis as an early-stage company redefining the Future of Work. It is joined by our other portfolio companies in the sector including Career Karma, Certiverse, and Tendrel. Over a year after our investment in Hoop, we continue to have high conviction in the company given its experienced founding team, strides in product development, and user interest thus far.
We would like to extend our congratulations to Stella, Brian, and Justin on a successful raise! We look forward to partnering with Hoop as it continues to utilize AI to build a better way of working. If you are looking to try out a new productivity or task management tool, reserve access to Hoop today!
