Former Chartbeat, Scroll CEO Tony Haile raises $10.7M for new startup Filament
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Tony Haile, the founding CEO of both media analytics company Chartbeat and Scroll, a news startup that sold to Twitter, has raised $10.7 million in seed funding to launch Filament, an invite-only professional conversations platform.
Why it matters: Haile believes professional networking is shifting from open feeds on platforms like LinkedIn to closed spaces where executives can have more private conversations.
- "The future of professional platforms is not feeds, it's group chats," he tells Axios. The invite-only model preserves trust, he says.
Zoom in: Because Haile has a successful track record of building products specifically for professionals in the news and information space, he expects early adopters of this type of platform to be in publishing, media and tech, but it is built to serve any type of professional.
- "Publishers have an opportunity to own this new space," he says, noting that media outlets are becoming increasingly focused on journalists and content creators as conveners of ideas.
- Haile says his primary focus is to scale the platform via feedback from a select number of "design partners," or beta testers, before focusing on a monetization plan.
Follow the money: The seed funding for Filament comes from EQT Ventures, Flybridge Capital and Oceans Ventures, with support from Mozilla Ventures, Betaworks, and industry leaders Jay Sullivan and Frank D'Souza.
- Haile is co-founding the platform with Wes Chow, former leader of MIT Media Lab's research on AI and healthy social platforms; Mari Zumbro, who led strategy and operations for new products and user safety initiatives at Twitter; and Daniel Salinas, an engineer who worked at tech giants like Foursquare and Roblox.
Zoom out: While tools like Slack allow people to network with peers in channels outside of their company, Haile says Filament is built explicitly to make that type of cross-company collaboration easier.
- For example, the platform has a tool that makes it easy to cross-post insights between channels without revealing the identity of the post's author.
- Internal and external group chats are combined in one interface that makes it easy to communicate internally and externally simultaneously.
- The platform leverages AI to make it easier to summarize lengthy group chats and search chats for specific topics.
The big picture: For years, startups have tried to conquer the private chat space for professionals with audio, to little success.
- Clubhouse laid off half of its staff in 2023. X still has "Spaces," its Clubhouse competitor, but it's not considered a core feature of the platform.
