Why We Invested in Jumbo

After operating quietly for the past year, our portfolio company Jumbo made a couple big announcements yesterday, including the launch of Jumbo 2 as well as their $8M series A financing led by Balderton Capital.

We were proud to be investors in Jumbo pre-product and to be working once again with Pierre Valade, one of the founders of NextView I portfolio company Sunrise. Pierre and his team are among the best product designers in the world, and do all the hard little things under the covers to make products work like magic.

The mission of Jumbo is to give consumers control of their privacy and data and restore peace of mind.  The company created this video to share their vision as they launch version 2:

We all know that our data is strewn about the internet in ways that we can’t keep track of or even understand. In an insidious way, it’s something that we have come to just accept as the way things are in a market of free services that are monetized through ads and the exchange of user data.

Personally, I am not a zealot about privacy. I think free social services and digital media create a ton of value and I’m happy with some exchange of my data for better personalization and targeting. The problem is that there is no balance of power in an ecosystem that is heavily tilted away from end users. Either you accept the way things are, or use privacy products that present too much of a binary choice or create user experience issues that make the internet unusable.  Jumbo is looking to provide that balance and to be an advocate for end users. And they have an old-school, highly aligned business model – consumers can pay to use the premium version of their service.

In addition to an amazing team and a worthy, timely problem, Jumbo fits in seamlessly with our theme around “Peace of Mind” businesses. These businesses are hard to build, depend on establishing trust over long periods of time, but can be incredibly durable and last a long time. It’s just day 1 at Jumbo, but we are excited for the journey ahead and the potential to build an important company. For more on Jumbo:

Download the app here on iOS and Android

The company’s blog post here