Mmhmm, the startup, has managed to raise funding worth $100M recently. It’s Phil Libin’s second act after Evernote. Mmhmm was born during the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, it provides improved video chat tools that include automatic background removal and advanced presentation features. The company is just over a year old. It has already raised a total of around $140 million thanks to a fresh injection of $100 million.
All about Mmhmm and its business model
It is not the first time in tech that a Startup with an amusing name has raised lots of money, but Libin’s startup earns extra credit for barely having a name at all. It is just a sound after all.
The company was built on the idea that current video tools are not adequate to provide users with access to all the potential that modern technology offers. Particularly, when it comes to presentations. Mmhmm’s core presenter tools help the meetings look more like professional newscasts than warmed-over digital versions of transparency slideshows and whiteboard scrawls. Furthermore, the company has been steadily adding features and improving its performance through frequent iterations since its founding.
Future course
Right now, mmhmm works in tandem with the existing video services that people use for virtual meetings, including Zoom. But according to reports, it’s going to go standalone soon, and also introduce a mobile app version. That sounds like a good use of the new funds. These funds come from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital, and more.
Even projecting forward to a post-pandemic world where virtual meetings are less important, they’re probably still a permanent part of the working world. But mmhmm’s feature set is the definition of the concept ‘feature, not product’. This is presented as a cautionary tale to startups rising leaps and bounds in terms of raises and valuation.