Commissionthe three-year-old New York startup that created what it calls “together tech” — technology designed to bring people physically into the same room — closed a $20 million Series A round led by Union Square Ventures.
General partner Michael Mignano, in his first investment since joining USV, will join the firm’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 — introduced the board 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, combining the tactile feel of board games with the interactivity of video games.
Traction from the launch has been strong, the company says: Board is now 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.
Along with the funding, Board announced Board Studio, an AI-powered authoring platform that will be released later this year and will allow anyone to create game prototypes using natural language prompts — from idea to playable prototype in less than an hour, it says.
The board previously raised $15 million in funding led by venture capital firm Lerer Hippeau, which also led the Mirror’s $3 million years ago. That was a gamble that paid off handsomely when Putnam sold the fitness affiliate to Lululemon in 2020.
Putnam sees the Board as a natural extension of what she learned about consumer hardware while building the Mirror. “Mirror was a lot for me,” he once told TechCrunch. “It was my reflection, my performance, it was about bettering yourself. In that next phase, my life was really much more about my family and my friends and my relationships.”
The result is a product based on the simple but increasingly popular idea that the best use of technology might be to get people to put down their devices and look each other in the face.
The increase comes at a time when consumer technology, long out of favor with investors, is showing signs of recovery, driven in large part by what artificial intelligence is making possible recently.
“I’m more excited about the consumer than I’ve been in a long time,” Ben Lerer, managing partner of Lerer Hippeau, said late last year during a separate meeting with TechCrunch. “We’re seeing a very high-quality group of founders who are saying, ‘Now is the time to get back into the pool.’ There are things that are possible today that weren’t possible six months ago or a year ago, and the gradient is steep.”
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