Board, the three-year-old, New York-based startup building what it calls “together tech” — tech designed to bring people physically into the same 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 company’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 recognize physical game pieces, blending the tactile feel of board games with the interactivity of video games.
Traction since launch has been strong, the company says: Board is now in tens of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals, and restaurants across all 50 states, with 85% of customers averaging 30 or more play sessions per month.
Alongside the funding, Board announced Board Studio, an AI-powered creation platform launching later this year that will let anyone build 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 venture 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 building Mirror. “Mirror was very much about me,” she once told TechCrunch. “It was my reflection, my performance, it was about making your own self better. At that next phase, my life was really just much more about my family and my friends and my relationships.”
The result is a product built around the simple but increasingly popular idea that the best use of tech might be to get people to put their devices down and look each other in the face.
The raise arrives at a moment when consumer tech, long out of favor with investors, is showing signs of bouncing back, driven in large part by what AI is making newly possible.
“I’m more excited about consumer than I’ve been in a long time,” said Ben Lerer, managing partner of Lerer Hippeau, late last year during a separate sit-down with TechCrunch. “We’re seeing a very high-quality group of founders saying, ‘Now’s the time to get back in the pool.’ There are things that are possible today that weren’t possible six months ago or a year ago, and the slope is steep.”
Source: TechCrunch
