Marissa Mayer's Dazzle secures $8M to build next-gen AI personal assistant for consumers

Marissa Mayer's new startup Dazzle raises $8M led by Forerunner's Kirsten Green | TechCrunch

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer refuses to sit on the sidelines of the generative AI revolution. After spending the last six years running Sunshine, a photo-sharing and contact-management startup with little success, the storied tech leader has shuttered the company to launch Dazzle, a new startup focused on building the next generation of AI personal assistants. While Mayer is not yet sharing specifics about Dazzle's functionality, she has revealed that the 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 has admitted to investing her own capital in the startup, she emphasized that the round was led by Green, a venture capitalist with a record of identifying iconic consumer brands such as Warby Parker, Chime, and Dollar Shave Club. Green's investment suggests Dazzle is poised for the coming wave of new AI-infused consumer businesses. The founder of Forerunner Ventures previously told TechCrunch that while enterprise AI took the early lead in this tech cycle, consumer-facing AI is a "late bloomer" that's finally ready for its breakout. Even for a founder of Mayer's fame, landing Green as a lead investor is a significant stamp of credibility for Dazzle, especially after Sunshine was widely considered to be a flop. "I think she really has a great sense for 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 that we were much more excited about," she said, noting that Dazzle has potential for "a much bigger impact" than what Sunshine was building. Originally founded as Lumi Labs in 2018, Sunshine first launched with a subscription app for contact management dubbed "Sunshine Contacts." Despite its founder's high profile, the product struggled to gain traction. Privacy advocates raised alarms over the app's practice of pulling home addresses from public databases to enrich contact lists, and the company never recovered from the initial skepticism. By 2024, the company broadened 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 usage. Sunshine raised a total of $20 million from investors, including Felicis, Norwest Venture Partners, and Unusual Ventures. When the company was dissolved, investors received 10% of Dazzle's equity, Mayer said. Reflecting on Sunshine's struggle, Mayer was candid about its limitations, admitting the problems the company was tackling were too "mundane" and not large enough. "I don't think we got it to the state of overall polish and accessibility that I really wanted it to be," she added. Mayer is now betting that the lessons from Sunshine will help her build a much more resilient and impactful business with Dazzle. Before her tenure as Yahoo CEO, Mayer was employee number 20 at Google, where she helped design Google search 'look and feel', and oversaw the development of Google Maps and AdWords. "I have had the rare privilege of being at two companies that really changed how 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 build a product that has that kind of impact again." Dazzle is expected to come out of stealth mode early next year. Its website, dazzle.ai, is currently password-protected, blocking public access.

Dazzle, a new AI startup led by Marissa Mayer, raises $8M - SiliconANGLE

Dazzle AI Inc., a startup founded by former Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer, today announced that it has raised $8 million in funding. Prominent venture capitalist Kirsten Green led the investment. She was joined by Mayer, Kleiner Perkins, Greycroft, Offline Ventures, Slow Ventures, Bling Capital, Amino Capital and Acquired Wisdom Fund. The round values Dazzle at $35 million. Before launching the company, Mayer led Yahoo as CEO for five years. She oversaw the sale of the one-time internet giant's core assets to Verizon Communications Inc. in 2017. She earlier held senior roles at Google LLC and helped lead the development of the search giant's advertising services. According to TechCrunch, Dazzle is developing an artificial intelligence personal assistant. The company's website states that its "mission is simple: to bridge the gap between what you want and what AI can do with AI." The website also specifies that the software will be geared towards the consumer market. Dazzle reportedly emerged from another consumer technology startup, Sunshine, that Mayer founded in 2018. The latter company developed a contact management app with AI features. The app enabled users to deduplicate information in Google Contacts, enrich it with external data and access it through a search bar. Last March, Sunshine added a tool for organizing events. Mayer shut down the company a few months after the feature update. Sunshine failed to draw a large user base, with the app's Google Play listing showing that it was only downloaded about 1,000 times. The company's investors received a 10% stake in Dazzle. A job posting for an iOS developer on Dazzle's website indicates that it plans to make its AI assistant available on mobile devices. Dazzle is also seeking an AI researcher who can help its team "architect, develop, and evaluate AI models." Training large language models can be a highly expensive undertaking. Given Dazzle's modest initial funding, it's possible the company will seek to develop a customized version of an existing, open-source LLM instead of training a model from scratch. The former approach is more cost-efficient thanks to model customization methods such as LoRA that reduce infrastructure requirements. Model training is not the only major expense involved in bringing a consumer AI service to market. Depending on the service's popularity, processing inference requests can require even more infrastructure. Dazzle might seek to minimize its inference costs by using on-device AI models to power its assistant instead of sending requests to a cloud-hosted model. The company reportedly plans to share more information about its service early next year.

Ex-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Launches Startup to Simplify AI | PYMNTS.com

The company achieved a $35 million post-money valuation in the round, it said in a Tuesday (Dec. 23) press release. Dazzle AI aims to make artificial intelligence (AI) "more intuitive and genuinely useful" by leveraging Mayer's experience in user-centered technology and providing tools that simplify technology, according to the release. The company will use the funding to expand its team and prepare to launch its first product within months, per the release. "Now that foundational models have reached a level of consistent excellence, they've become a reliable infrastructure," Mayer said in the release. "The new frontier is applications -- leveraging that power to create real, tangible value. I'm thrilled to be building something new alongside an incredible group of investors and partners." PYMNTS reported that Mayer left Yahoo in 2017, when Verizon acquired the company amid a wave of mergers and acquisitions that had been the hallmark of media and content firms. After leaving Yahoo, Mayer founded Sunshine (formerly Lumi Labs) to help people use technology, according to her LinkedIn profile. TechCrunch reported Tuesday that Mayer shuttered Sunshine to launch Dazzle AI. When announcing the launch of Sunshine in 2020, Mayer said in a press release that the firm was dedicated to building better alternatives to existing technologies that "help us stay connected to those who matter most." At launch, Sunshine said it offered an app called Sunshine Contacts that used AI and other technologies to automatically organize and improve iPhone contacts. Mayer is also on the boards of directors of Starbucks, Hilton, AT&T and Walmart, according to her LinkedIn profile. From 1999 to 2012, Mayer was with Google and held several positions, including vice president, local, maps and location services. Kirsten Green, founding partner at Forerunner, who led Dazzle AI's seed round, said in the release that the builders of tomorrow's winning platforms think in terms of entirely new ecosystems. "As a leader, Marissa embodies the ambition and bravery that's essential to taking this kind of big swing," Green said. "We have barely scratched the surface of having AI integrated into daily routines in a way that feels human, enriching and transformatively useful."