Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer refuses to be left out of the generative AI revolution.
After spending the last six years running Sunshine, a photo-sharing and contact management startup with little success, the famed tech leader has farm the business to launch Dazzlea new startup focused on creating the next generation of AI personal assistants.
While Mayer isn’t yet sharing details about Dazzle’s features, she did reveal that the new company raised an $8 million seed round at a valuation of $35 million. The round was led by Kirsten Green of Forerunner, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Greycroft, Offline Ventures, Slow Ventures and Bling Capital. Although Mayer admitted to investing her own capital in the startup, she emphasized that the round was led by Green, a venture capitalist with a long track record of identifying iconic consumer brands such as Warby Parker, Chime and Dollar Shave Club.
Green’s investment suggests Dazzle is ready for wave to come new AI-infused consumer businesses. The founder of Forerunner Ventures previously told TechCrunch that while enterprise AI has taken the lead in this technology cycle, consumer AI is a “late bloomer” that’s finally ready to make its mark.
Even for one of the founders of Mayer fame, making Green a lead investor is an important credibility boost for Dazzle, especially after Sunshine was widely considered a failure. “I think she 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 terms of ambition and opportunity. “We realized this was something we were much more excited about,” she said, noting that Dazzle has the potential to have “a much bigger impact” than what Sunshine was building.
Originally founded as Lumi Labs in 2018, Sunshine first launched with a contact management subscription app called “Sunshine Contacts.” Despite the notoriety of its founder, the product struggled to gain traction. Privacy advocates raised alarms over the app’s practice of scraping home addresses from public databases to enrich contact lists, and the company never recovered from the initial skepticism. By 2024, the company has expanded its offering in added event management and “Shine”, an AI-powered photo sharing tool. The new offering was widely criticized for its outdated design and also failed to garner widespread usage.
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Sunshine has raised a total of $20 million from investors including Felicis, Norwest Venture Partners and Unusual Ventures. When the company dissolved, investors received 10 percent of Dazzle’s equity, Mayer said.
Reflecting on Sunshine’s struggle, Mayer was candid about its limitations, admitting that the problems the company was tackling were too “mundane” and not important enough. “I don’t think we’ve achieved the overall state of finish and accessibility that I really wanted,” she added.
Mayer is now betting that Sunshine’s lessons will help him build a much more resilient and impactful business with Dazzle.
Prior to her tenure as CEO of Yahoo, Mayer was employee number 20 at Google, where she helped design the look and feel of Google Search and oversaw the development of Google Maps and AdWords.
“I’ve had the rare privilege of working at two companies that have really changed the way people do things,” Mayer told TechCrunch. “For many, Yahoo defined the Internet. Google, in terms of search and maps, changed everything. I really aspire to create a product that has that kind of impact again.”
Dazzle is expected to exit stealth mode early next year.