Board, the new gaming startup from Mirror founder Brynn Putnam, raises $20 million, and has already sold thousands

blackboardthe three-year-old New York-based startup that builds what it calls “tech together” — technology designed to virtually bring people into the same room — has closed a $20 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures.

General Partner Michael Mignano, in his first investment since joining USV, will join the company’s board of directors. The round also brought in some famous angel investors including Biz Stone, Tim Ferriss and Scott Belsky.

The raise comes about eight months after founder Bryn Putnam — who previously sold a Mirror-related fitness startup to Lululemon for $500 million — The council was unveiled publicly At TechCrunch Disrupt last October.

The board device is a 24-inch touchscreen monitor in a wooden frame that uses proprietary technology to recognize physical game pieces, blending the tactile feel of board games with the interactivity of video games.

The company says traction since launch has been strong: The Board is now in tens of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and restaurants in all 50 states, with 85% of customers averaging 30 or more gaming sessions per month.

Along with the funding, Board announced Board Studio, an AI-powered creation platform launching later this year that will allow anyone to build original games using natural language prompts — from concept to playable prototype in less than an hour, she says.

The board had previously raised $15 million in funding led by investment firm Lerer Hippeau, which also led Mirror’s $3 million seed round years earlier. It was a bet that paid off well when Putnam sold the connected fitness company to Lululemon in 2020.

Putnam sees Board as a natural extension of what she learned about consumer devices while building Mirror. “The mirror was very much about me,” she once told TechCrunch. “It was my thinking and my performance, and it was about making yourself better. At that next stage, my life was actually about my family, my friends, and my relationships.”

The result is a product built on the simple but increasingly popular idea that the best use of technology might be to get people to put down their devices and look into each other’s faces.

The increase comes at a time when consumer technology, long out of favor with investors, is showing signs of a rebound, driven in large part by what artificial intelligence has recently made possible.

“I’m more excited about the consumer than I have been in a long time,” Ben Lerer, managing partner of Lerer Hippeau, said late last year during a conference. Separate sit-in With TechCrunch. “We’re seeing a high-quality group of founders saying, ‘It’s time to get back into the mix.’ There are things that are possible today that weren’t possible six months ago or a year ago, and the slope is very steep.”