K Fund bets on Hooks and on the evolution of mobile notifications
It was April of 2015 and K Fund was simply a work in progress, we hadn’t even started fundraising.
But all good stories are also long ones, such as our investment in Hooks. Back then we were invited by Eduardo Manchón -one of the best Spanish entrepreneurs- to spend a day in Alicante, where we got to know many great startups. We spent a lot of time with Eduardo while we where down there, but also with Josele Perez, who at the time was just starting Hooks with his co-founder Oleg Kozynenko.
We thought they didn’t need VC money, but we did believe that they needed some cash since they’d just been selected by Techstars. But instead of telling them ‘please come tomorrow when you have a better product’, what we did was to help them raise capital from a top business angel. Yago Arbeloa bet on them as they embarked on the Techstars adventure.
While the team was in Chicago, we kept in touch and helped them in any way we can, and that’s perhaps why today we can call Hooks one of K Fund’s first investments.
Hooks is an app that helps ease the pain that mobile notifications cause to most users.
Don’t you receive tons of notifications on any given day? Don’t you wish to find out about certain things without the need to install multiple apps? A new episode of your favourite TV show? The weather in your city? When your favourite team scores a goal? When your servers are down? When the stock you own has dropped in price?
Fred Wilson of USV has written several times about notifications, in essence sharing our vision about the challenge they represent for both developers and users alike.
All of the aforementioned, Hooks does it in just one app and even allows users to create their own notifications. And to cap it off, in the product’s latest version they’ve added a conversational layer that brings similar users together.
We believe in Josele and Oleg, we believe that notifications are going to change and we want to push Hooks forward. Download Hooks here.
