Would you trust this startup to plan a mystery date for you?
/We did — and here’s what it was like
It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Friday and I have plans. At least, that’s what I’m told. I have no idea what those plans might be — and neither does my date.
We’re out of the loop because we’ve hired a new startup called Mystery to keep us out. The company uses technology to plan your evening without asking you to lift a finger.
Mystery was started by Shane Kovalsky and Vince Coppola, who met while working at Convoy, a billion-dollar Seattle startup that operates a marketplace for the trucking industry.
“At Convoy, we learned that very difficult operations problems can be automated, and we’re doing the same thing here,” said Coppola, Mystery’s chief technology officer. Initially, the pair wanted to plan entire weekends, but they soon scaled back those ambitions to planning evenings on the town, such as dates or small group outings.
After working under the radar for several months, Mystery just launched an app. The startup, which has six employees, also raised a seed round of $1.2 million led by Founders’ Co-op along with a cadre of other investors including Liquid 2 Ventures, Frontier Venture Capital, Gramercy Ventures, Ride Ventures, Pixvana CEO Forest Key, former LinkedIn and 23andMe COO Sarah Imbach, and Crowd Cow CEO Joe Heitzeberg.