Marissa Mayer’s new AI startup Dazzle raises $8M seed round

Marissa Mayer has launched Dazzle, a new startup focused on building AI personal assistants. The company has secured an $8 million seed round—an early-stage funding round—at a $35 million valuation. The funding round was led by Kirsten Green, the lead investor at Forerunner. Mayer expressed strong confidence in Green’s leadership, stating that she believes Green has an excellent sense of where people and platforms are heading. Dazzle is currently operating in secret before a public product launch, and the company is expected to come out of this stealth mode early next year.

The launch of Dazzle follows the closure of Sunshine, Mayer’s previous startup, which has been shuttered after six years of operation. Sunshine was widely considered to be a flop. Originally founded as Lumi Labs in 2018, the startup raised a total of $20 million from investors, including Felicis, Norwest Venture Partners, and Unusual Ventures. Sunshine first launched a contact-management application, but privacy advocates raised alarms over the app’s practice of pulling home addresses from public databases to enrich contact lists. By 2024, the company broadened its offering to include photo sharing and event management, but the new offering was widely criticized for its outdated design and similarly failed to attract widespread usage. Reflecting on Sunshine’s limitations, Mayer admitted that the team did not get the product to the level of overall polish and accessibility she had wanted. When Sunshine was dissolved, its investors received 10% of Dazzle’s equity.

The Sunshine team began prototyping Dazzle last summer, a project that Mayer noted had potential for a much larger impact than their previous work. Mayer, who was employee number 20 at Google and later served as the CEO of Yahoo, is positioning the new venture to achieve a broader reach. The $8 million seed round also saw participation from several other investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Greycroft, Offline Ventures, Slow Ventures, and Bling Capital. Reflecting on her career, Mayer noted her past at major tech platforms. “Yahoo, for many, defined the internet. Google, in terms of Search and Maps, changed everything. I really aspire to build a product that has that kind of impact again,” said Mayer, the founder of Dazzle.

Why it matters

The funding round signals investor confidence in Marissa Mayer’s pivot to consumer-facing AI—AI products designed for individual users—following the closure of her previous startup, Sunshine.