Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is not sitting on the sidelines of the generative AI revolution. After spending six years running Sunshine, a photo-sharing and contact-management startup with limited success, the storied tech leader has shuttered that company to launch Dazzle. This new startup is 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 eight million dollar seed round at a thirty-five million dollar 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, 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 has previously stated that while enterprise AI took the early lead, consumer-facing AI is a late bloomer that is 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.
Mayer said that the Sunshine team began prototyping Dazzle last summer, a project that quickly eclipsed their previous work in ambition and opportunity. She noted 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 called 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 an AI-powered photo-sharing tool called Shine. The new offering was widely criticized for its outdated design and similarly failed to attract widespread usage. Sunshine raised a total of twenty million dollars from investors. When the company was dissolved, investors received ten percent of Dazzle’s equity.
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. She added that the product did not reach the state of overall polish and accessibility she wanted.
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 twenty at Google, where she helped design Google Search’s look and feel and oversaw the development of Google Maps and AdWords. She stated that she aspires to build a product with the kind of world-changing impact she experienced at Google and Yahoo.
Dazzle is expected to come out of stealth mode early next year. Its website is currently password-protected, blocking public access.