Today, we at Unusual Ventures are thrilled to announce that we have partnered with Sunshine to realize its mission to help people stay in touch with those who matter in their lives. We are pleased to participate in their $20M seed round.

Sunshine, previously known as Lumi Labs, was founded by industry veterans from Yahoo! and Google, Marissa Mayer and Enrique Muñoz Torres. Sunshine products make mundane tasks effortless and reduce the friction of keeping up with personal and professional relationships so people can spend time more meaningfully. 

The company’s first app, Sunshine Contacts, is now available for download on iOS, with Android to follow soon. Once the app is downloaded, users enter their phone number and will be invited to use the app. Sunshine Contacts automatically organizes and improves people’s contacts, allowing them to easily find and share information in an efficient way. As the foundational product in Sunshine’s suite of services, Sunshine Contacts draws from a variety of sources to understand relationships between people and ensure your contact list is complete and up-to-date. By building on these insights, future apps from Sunshine will be able to help users effortlessly remember birthdays, organize events, and privately share information with family and friends. 

We’ve known Marissa for several years and have always respected the care with which she builds products, teams, and companies. Around the time I joined Unusual, Sunshine was in the process of raising a seed round and Marissa approached the team about getting involved. We immediately were excited about partnering with two proven product leaders. They are not afraid to dream big and build the kind of technology that can make something technically challenging feel seamless and magical to the end-user. 

After years of working with large teams at Yahoo! and Google, the Unusual Team has been impressed with how Marissa and Enrique have immersed themselves in understanding the everyday needs of their users. They are exactly the type of hands-on entrepreneurs who love building delightful products that we love to partner with at Unusual Ventures. We were also drawn to the massive opportunity for Sunshine, both in the near term with Contacts, and longer term with their broader suite of products and services.  Like many others, I have over 1,000’s of contacts and many are outdated with information scattered between contacts and email. Frankly, I don’t even know where to start to clean it up. It’s hard to deny that building a up-to-date network of our personal and professional relationships will allow for better, easier, and richer communication. Something we could all use more of in these extraordinary times of social distancing and need for connection. 

Sunshine’s goal of rethinking the everyday is a massive opportunity for engineers looking for their next challenge. Though Sunshine’s mission sounds relatively straightforward, the complexity of the technology required to solve these problems necessitates the best engineering minds. Marissa and Enrique have already made massive strides to assemble a world-class team and are looking to add even more engineering talent with ML and/or AI skills to continue to deliver on Sunshine’s broad mission.

The Unusual Team believes that the Sunshine Team has the experience and knowledge to build the modern relationship infrastructure for our everyday lives. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that there’s nothing more important than staying connected to the key people in our lives. We’re excited to partner with the Sunshine Team to build this foundation and all the future services on top of it for years to come. Congratulations to Marissa, Enrique, and the entire Sunshine Team!

Read more about Sunshine’s Seed Round and the launch of Sunshine Contacts from Fast Company

Learn more about how to set the right goals, approach the right investors, and craft a winning pitch in order to raise your seed or Series A round