Lunchbox is a new AI based startup that is primarily to assists business professionals search and locate new connections inside specific industries. The startup has recently secured a US$4 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz with other investors including Quora’s co-founder, the Robinhood cofounders, and Flexport’s cofounders.
The startup app follows in the footsteps of others that aimed to be dating app-like marketplaces for growing out your professional network by one to one lunch and coffee meetings. Lunchclub is more focused on setting up a handful of meetings for users that have a specific goal in mind. Lunchclub is aiming to be your warm intro and connect you with other users via email that can assist you in your professional objectives or aims.
Upon checking in to the service, you are asked to highlight some objectives that you might have and this is where the app really makes its goals clear. Options include, “raise funding,” “find a co-founder or parner,” “explore other companies,” and “brainstorm with peers.” These objectives are pretty explicit and complementary, i.e. for every “raise funding” objective, there’s an “invest” option. There is not a ton being asked for on the part of the user when it comes to building up the data on their profile, Lunchclub is hoping to get most of the data that they need from the rest of the web.
Vlad Novakovski Ceo Lunchbox commented in a phone interview with Thailand Startup News “Our view is that there is tons of data already out there online and in various platforms. Anything that comes from the existing social networks, be in things like Twitter,LinkedIn, be it things that are more specific to what people might be working on, like Github or Dribble or AngelList, all of those data sources are in the public domain and are fair game.”
Lunchclub’s main selling sell is that they can learn from what matches are successful via user feedback and use that to hone further matches. Novakovski most previously was the CTO of Euclid Analytics which WeWork acquired in 2017. Previous to that, he led the machine learning team at Quora.
The web app, which currently has a lengthy-waitlist, is available for users in seven cities in the US including the SF Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Austin and Seattle.
With the new fundings, the company is planning expand its reach and also improve its data mining and AI based modules to give users an even better experience and successful connection.
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