Last spring I hooked up PopVox designer William Donnell with the crew at MotherKnows. I expected that William would deliver beautiful design for their (just released) mobile app. I didn’t expect it would come with a song!
Category Archives: alumni
LUXr Teams Close funding from Google, CRV, First Round
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Congratulations to LUXr teams Astrid and MotherKnows on their recent funding announcements!
From Xconomy:
MotherKnows, a Menlo Park, CA-based startup building an online health record system for parents, said today that it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding. Among the startup’s backers are First Round Capital, Giza Ventures, Charles River Ventures, The Band of Angels, former Google Health product manager Maneesh Arora, and other individual investors. “MotherKnows is the first product specifically for parents that will collect and post all health data to a secure website and mobile app to help them stay on top of immunizations and share this information with schools, camps and caregivers as well as remain prepared for an emergency,” the company said in a statement.
From Venture Beat:
Astrid, an Android app that aims to reshape task management, announced today that it has received seed funding from Google Ventures and Nexus Partners…The app allows you to share tasks with your friends, which gives them an added bit of societal pressure that’s potentially more compelling than a typical task reminder. And in an interesting twist, [founder Jon] Paris also noticed that friends would occasionally help him out with tasks if they saw he was overloaded….Paris tells me that Astrid has received over 2 million downloads on Android (1.5 million since last July), with 24 million completed tasks.
LUXr company TaskRabbit closes $5M round from Shasta
I’ve been working with Leah Busque and her team at Task Rabbit since August of last year. Their fantastic team has been a proving ground for many of the lean UX methods that form the core of LUXr. Every week we would meet for half a day—optimizing conversions, implementing A/B testing, screening and hiring designers. They have developed a fantastic product executuion capability—It’s no wonder Shasta kicked in $5M to help them go nationwide!
TaskRabbit has been my inspiration, my test bed, and fellow explorers in the development of Lean UX methods. From everyone at LUXr, congratulations!
Here on GigaOm, Leah explains Task Rabbit, tells the founding story (it’s a good one), and offers advice to entrepreneurs.
Shasta Ventures partner Sean Flynn tells the story of why he invested.
Read the article on GigaOm.
Here’s the press release on CrunchBase.