Hi, Hello! 👋🏽
When we started HiHello in 2018, I had a hunch that the world needed a digital solution to the age-old problem of sharing who you are. Imagine back to Victorian times, when you arrived at the ball, you would hand your name card to someone who then announced your entrance. Yes, that is at least how old the concept of business cards is. The simple little paper business card represents who you are and how you want to be presented. It hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.
I’ve always believed that when people connect, amazing things happen. And it’s the humble (or sometimes not-so-humble!) business card that people often use to connect for the first time. In Silicon Valley, people love to dis on business cards. I think this is because in this digital age, people have a hard time reconciling their tech-forwardness with the tech-backwardness of handing someone a piece of paper (understandably so!). A core belief for us at HiHello is that “Everybody is somebody” and a business card is a way people can show who they are when they meet someone new.
HiHello is re-imagining what a business card is, what information it conveys, how it is accessed, how it is shared, how it is stored, and most importantly what it says about you, your company, and your brand. We’re building a solution that empowers everyone—from individuals, to small businesses, to large enterprise companies—to finally bring business cards into the modern age, with fully digital business cards that live on your mobile devices, are always with you, never run out, and make it easy to connect with the people you meet. Our mission is to strengthen relationships and amplify the power of your network, starting with digital business cards.
It is with this goal in mind that I am very excited to announce that HiHello has raised $7.5M in a Series A financing round to build the modern digital business card platform for individuals and businesses. The round was led by Foundry Group (thank you Brad Feld and Lindel Eakman!), with participation from Lux Capital (thank you Bilal Zuberi!), and existing investor August Capital (thank you David Hornik!). Several notable founders and operators also joined in the financing round including Logan Green and John Zimmer (co-founders of Lyft), Eugenio Pace (co-founder and CEO of Auth0, which was recently acquired by Okta), AJ Shankar (co-founder and CEO of Everlaw), Matt Van Horn (co-founder and CEO of June, formerly from Path), Christopher Michel and Anne Dwane (co-founders of Military.com), Adam Nash and Ellen Levy (former product and strategy leaders from LinkedIn), Mubarik Imam (former head of growth at WhatsApp), Anand Chandrasekaran (formerly from Facebook and currently at Five9 that was recently acquired by Zoom) and others. Of course, I also personally participated in the financing round.
One of my objectives with founding and running a company again is that I want to work with amazing people. I’m pleased that we’ve had the opportunity to bring so many amazing people together as investors in HiHello.
As part of this round, Lindel Eakman from Foundry Group, and Eugenio Pace (co-founder of Auth0) have joined the Board of Directors for HiHello. I’ve known both Lindel and Eugenio for many years and it is an honor and a pleasure for me to deepen and strengthen my relationship with them and add another way in which we are connected and working together. Lindel and Eugenio join me and Villi Iltchev on HiHello’s board.
Our near-term objective for HiHello is to build the best product and platform for digital business cards. For this, we’re actively looking to expand our team and bring on high-quality individuals to our team. We’re actively recruiting in all areas, but with an immediate focus on Product, Design, Backend Engineering, and Sales. If you are awesome at what you do and would like to be part of a company that is planning on changing how professionals connect and manage their relationships then please reach out to us at joinus@hihello.me.
If you’re an individual, you can try HiHello for free. If you’re a company—of any size—and you haven’t yet explored digital business cards for your team, you should check out our HiHello Business offering. With HiHello Business we’ve made it easy for companies to create, distribute, and manage digital business cards.
It’s 2021 and it’s time we all had a better way to connect digitally. Our whole team is excited about what lies ahead! Onwards!
