Former Trello Execs Found Hoop for AI-Powered Productivity Tool

Former Trello founding team members Stella Garber, Brian Schmidt, and Justin Gallagher have stayed on at Atlassian for several years after Atlassian acquired their project management software company for $425 million in January 2017. But it was time for something new.

They wanted to recreate the magic of what they helped create at Trello by creating something new in the productivity tool category that had the same brand love, vibrant culture, and fun work environment that comes with starting a new company.

“In the age of AI, if you were to create a project management tool, what would you do differently? What could you do now that you couldn’t do before? And our ‘aha’ moment was you wouldn’t have to write anything down, you wouldn’t have to create tickets or tasks or cards or whatever you wanted to call them. The product would just know what your tasks were for the day and it could help you get there. And that’s kind of the genesis of hoop, and that’s exactly what Hoop does,” Hoop co-founder and CEO Stella Garber said in an interview.

In 2022, the three joined forces to found New York-based Hoop, an AI-powered productivity tool that automatically logs tasks from video calls, emails, and Slack to create a self-updating master to-do list.

“We know this space pretty well. So I think we’re really excited about the opportunity to alleviate some of the burden of all of these repetitive, routine tasks that people have to do these days by having AI do it for you,” Garber says.

Hoop is part of the growing global productivity software market, which is expected to reach $79.07 billion in 2024 and $88.05 billion by 2028, according to Statista.

On how the name came about and what it means, Garber says, “We wanted the name to be fun. We have this idea of ​​a virtuous cycle of being calm and having things together at work, so that you can carry that energy over into your personal life. So we really like the idea of ​​a circle and getting things done, making sure that everything comes full circle.”

According to Garber, Hoop currently uses OpenAI as a base LLM, then builds an application layer on top of it. He believes the team has a unique track record of building software that is easy and fun to use and that people benefit from.

It’s still early days for the new productivity tool, which is still in beta. But they already have paying customers and are signing up hundreds of new customers per day, according to Garber.

“We’re very focused on getting individuals into the product and building a product that’s really valuable to that person who’s overwhelmed and drowning in requests. And then we’ll be building a team version shortly after that. So the strategy is to focus on the individual first, and then we can really build a team version, potentially an enterprise version,” Garber says.

Building on its current trajectory, the company recently announced that it will receive $5 million in seed funding in June 2024, led by Index Ventures, with participation from Origin Ventures, Divergent Capital, Chingona Venture, and angel investors including all of Trello’s early leadership team, as well as a number of investors such as Trello co-founder Michael Pryor, Andy Dunn, co-founder of Bonobas, and many others.

“Hoop has become an indispensable tool. Work is about getting things done, and that’s hard if you can’t remember what it’s about. Hoop uses AI to centralize tasks from calls, messages, emails, and more into one place, and then lets you move your work forward. It’s a stunning product, which is no surprise since it’s built by the same team that created Trello,” says Damir Becirovic of Index Ventures in an interview.

“I think people are excited by the idea of ​​a to-do list that writes itself,” Garber says.

Garber was born in Uzbekistan. When she was 3, her parents emigrated from the then Soviet Union in 1989 as refugees fleeing anti-Semitism and seeking economic opportunity in the United States.

“We came to the United States with nothing but two suitcases and a lot of dreams. And my parents were able to really live the American dream, starting from nothing. My dad was a doctor in the former Soviet Union. When we moved here, none of his training and barely his education mattered,” Garber says of the family’s move to the small Midwestern town of Galesburg, Illinois, where her father was working to re-obtain his residency and start his own practice.

“And so I feel like from a young age, this idea that we brought you to America to give you a chance, we sacrificed so much, we left everything behind, that was always really instilled in me. And also, just the idea that even if you fail, what’s the worst that could happen compared to the persecution that my family went through. I think that’s a big part of my entrepreneurial DNA,” Garber says.

She graduated from Northwestern with a degree in psychology in 2009 and later earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her first job out of college was on the founding team of a Chicago fin tech startup that was acquired by Groupon in 2012. “When you’re a really early employee, you have to do everything. And so I found out that I was pretty good at talking to customers and telling stories, and then I found out that’s actually called marketing. So I guess I became a marketer,” Garber says.

She then co-founded Entrepreneurs Unplugged, a pioneer in entrepreneurship education and events, before becoming co-founder and CEO of Matchist in 2012, which connected companies with the best web and mobile developers across the country. She then joined Trello’s leadership team to build out its marketing and strategy team, and stayed at Atlassian after the acquisition until leaving in 2021 to start Hoop.

What about the future? “We really think that there’s a lot of time wasted on updating and managing things. So we see ourselves playing a big role in that in terms of a project management system that takes so much of that routine, repetitive work out of people’s hands and makes it very easy to manage work in a way that feels very effortless,” Garber concludes.