Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer refuses to sit on the sidelines of the artificial intelligence genetics revolution.
After spending the past six years running Sunshine, a photo-sharing and contact-management startup with little success, the famed tech leader shut down the company to start Thambosa new startup focused on building the next generation of AI personal assistants.
While Mayer isn’t yet sharing details about Dazzle’s functionality, she did reveal that the new company has raised an $8 million seed round at a $35 million valuation. The round was led by Forerunner’s Kirsten Green, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Greycroft, Offline Ventures, Slow Ventures and Bling Capital. Although Mayer acknowledged that she invested her own capital in the startup, she emphasized that the round was led by Green, a venture capitalist with a track record of identifying iconic consumer brands such as Warby Parker, Chime and Dollar Shave Club.
Green’s investment suggests that Dazzle is ready for the coming wave of new AI-powered consumer businesses. The Forerunner Ventures founder previously told TechCrunch that while business AI has taken the lead in this tech cycle, consumer-facing AI is a “late bloomer” that’s finally ready to take off.
Even for a founder of Mayer’s fame, landing Green as a lead investor is an important stamp of credibility for Dazzle, especially since Sunshine was widely seen as a failure. “I think he really has a great sense of where people and platforms are going,” Mayer said.
Mayer told TechCrunch that the Sunshine team began prototyping Dazzle last summer, a project that quickly eclipsed their previous work in ambition and opportunity. “We realized that this was something we were much more excited about,” he said, noting that Dazzle has the potential for “much more impact” than what Sunshine was building.
Originally founded as Lumi Labs in 2018, Sunshine first launched with a subscription-based contact management app called “Sunshine Contacts”. Despite its founder’s high profile, the product struggled to gain traction. Privacy advocates warned about the app’s practice of pulling home addresses from public databases to populate contact lists, and the company never recovered from initial skepticism. By 2024, the company expanded its offering by adding event management and ‘Shine’, an AI-powered photo sharing tool. The new offering was widely criticized for its outdated design and similarly failed to attract widespread use.
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Sunshine raised a total of $20 million from investors including Felicis, Norwest Venture Partners and Unusual Ventures. When the company was dissolved, the investors received 10 percent of Dazzle’s equity, Mayer said.
Reflecting on Sunshine’s struggle, Mayer was candid about his limitations, admitting that the problems facing the company were too “mundane” and not big enough. “I don’t think we got it to the state of overall gloss and accessibility that I really wanted it to be,” he added.
Mayer is now betting that lessons from Sunshine will help her build a much more resilient and effective business with Dazzle.
Prior to her tenure as CEO of Yahoo, Mayer was employee number 20 at Google, where she helped design the Google search “look and feel” and oversaw the development of Google Maps and AdWords.
“I’ve had the rare privilege of being at two companies that have really changed the way people do things,” Mayer told TechCrunch. “Yahoo, for many, defined the Internet. Google, in terms of Search and Maps, changed everything. I really aspire to create a product that has that impact again.”
Dazzle is expected to come out of stealth mode early next year.
