What started as a joke is now a well-funded startup. More than could well be said. With a first round of 4.5 million dollars, now they raise a second operation of 100 million dollars. We are talking about mmhmm, the surprise success project of Evernote founder Phil Libin, which against all odds has survived its first year of life. The video conferencing startup that wants to distinguish itself from Zoom, Slack, Meet and co is on its way. Alive and kicking.
Funded by SoftBank, Sequoia, Mubadala, and Human Capital, Libin recognizes Hypertextual what mmhmm was never created to do a real company. Starting its project in May and launching to the world in July 2020, what is certain is that the arrival of the pandemic did magic for the Libin startup. As a consequence, the name – which they now recognize is too late to change – remains. And they don’t seem to be doing anything wrong: even with their complicated pronunciation, mmhmm he has investors in his pocket.
Libin’s company has even overcome the biggest doubts that remained about its business. mmhmm was born in the womb All Turtles, a startup creation study founded by the businessman after leaving Evernote in 2017, and a few days after it was born he was already faced with an idea that was on everyone’s head: what prevented competition, with which in fact they have to work closely, copy the product base of mmhmm.
mmhmm, a necessary product, but saturated?
“We started mmhmm trying to make people start to be more fun on video, to be more entertaining and to express themselves better,” Libin explains to Hypertextual. Through a videoconference via Zoom, Libin uses precisely the benefits of its own product. Dynamic and colored backgrounds, skins, slides, embedded videos… anything goes for mmhmm in video matters. “It is a way of giving people superpowers of communication,” he adds.
With support for any video platform of the moment, mmhmm knows that it must be renewed. Otherwise, the product easily replicable by native platforms would end up in oblivion. For this reason, the founder affirms that in addition to having support for all applications on the market, mmhmm is working on its own native video conferencing tool. In this way, your focus can go beyond institutional meetings and be directed, for example, to the online education sector.
With this, he points out that, for now, the video business still has a lot to say.
“The video industry is going to become something much bigger in a few years. Much bigger than it is now. It is in the process of transformation.”
Phil Libin, founder of mmhmm
To the optimistic and enthusiastic founder, the sector is still being defined and finding its place. The pandemic forced to find quick solutions for an unusual situation; We now know that the concept of videoconferencing has come to stay accompanied by an ever-increasing teleworking. mmhmm, for his part, defends two issues. On the one hand, boring meetings of boring and tired people have moved into the world of video. Also that not everything has to be black and white: video is not a substitute for personal relationships, or vice versa. “People do not have to use video for everything, they will only use it for when they need it and it is necessary, so you have to create a product so that it is used when it is needed and not because it is the only mechanism,” he adds.
In all this context, the video industry is on track to become platforms and then it will be seen. “I have no idea what is going to happen, but we want to work together with them to be in the future. We will be there when the industry decides what to do“Libin points out.
Expansion financing
Not content with having exceeded the world’s expectations a year after its release, mmhmm works on its expansion. With 40% of its users in the United States, curiously the second market for the videoconferencing startup is Japan. 14% specifically. But it has a trick, Japanese is the second language of the app by a personal connection of the founder with Japan.
Now it is the turn of the rest of the languages, including Spanish. In a few weeks, they confirm that they will be available in 13 more languages and trust that the Spanish-speaking regions – which includes Latin America as a whole – will carry more weight than the United States as a whole.