Board, a three-year-old New York-based startup building what the company calls “together tech” – technology designed to bring people physically into the same room, has completed a $20 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures.
General Partner Michael Mignano will join the company’s board of directors, marking his first investment since joining USV. The round also included participation from well-known angel investors including Biz Stone, Tim Ferriss, and Scott Belsky.
The raise comes about eight months after founder Bryn Putnam, who previously sold connected fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million, unveiled Board at TechCrunch Disrupt last October.
The Board device is a 24-inch touchscreen housed in a wood-finished frame that uses proprietary technology to recognize physical game pieces, blending the tactility of board games with the interactivity of video games.
The company says traction since launch has been strong, with Board now being used in tens of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and restaurants in 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 production platform that will launch later this year. This allows anyone to build their own games using natural language prompts, going from idea to playable prototype in less than an hour.
Board previously raised $15 million in funding led by venture firm Lerer Hippeau, which led Mirror’s $3 million seed round a few years ago. That gamble paid off in spades when Putnam sold his connected fitness company to Lululemon in 2020.
Putnam sees Board as a natural extension of what he learned about consumer hardware while building Mirror. “Mirror was very important to me,” she once told TechCrunch. “It was my reflection, my performance, and making myself better. In the next stage, my life was really about family, friends, and relationships.”
The result is a product built on the simple but increasingly popular idea that the best use of technology may be to get people to put down their devices and look at each other.
The hike comes at a time when consumer technology, long unpopular with investors, is showing signs of recovery, largely due to new possibilities enabled by AI.
In a separate roundtable with TechCrunch late last year, Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau, said, “We’re more excited than ever about consumer-facing.” “We’re seeing a very high-quality group of founders saying, ‘Now is the time to get back in the pool.’ Things that weren’t possible six months ago or a year ago are possible today, and the slope is steep.”
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