Funding Announcement: Particle

This is a cross-post from our February 29, 2024 blog post here.

Sara Beykpour and Marcel Molina met at Twitter, where they were early engineers on the service before it was really clear what it was for — but it was clear that users couldn’t get enough of whatever it was (as evidenced all too often by Twitter’s infamous outages and Fail Whale). How early was it? One of the initial features Marcel helped ship was the first version of Retweet, and Sara built the first version of Twitter for Android (and later, for Vine, Periscope and Secret).

We had the opportunity to work with them there and observe their technical and product leadership up-close. And together, we and other early employees along with Twitter’s early users figured it out — and Twitter became a critical part of how we got information about what was happening around the world, in real-time. Since that time, Sara and Marcel have held senior roles in product and engineering at Twitter and Tesla respectively — they’ve been a part of and seen what it looks like to build something brand new that becomes mainstream.

Now, more than a decade later, we’re in the midst of a tectonic shift. AI is cracking open endless new possibilities for how information is consumed and shared and deeply entrenched consumer habits are shifting — products like ChatGPT and Midjourney have grown to massive scale with unprecedented speed. And this is just the beginning.

So when Sara and Marcel set out to start Particle — an app focused on giving users more powerful tools to get their news, powered by AI — we jumped at the chance to partner with them. Their work at the forefront of social innovation, and the technical challenges they’d faced and overcome while running the world’s largest real-time service through rapid growth, make them uniquely suited to see the gaps that even still exist in getting reliable news about the topics important to you.

Sara and Marcel have been quietly building — the product as well as their team — and are hiring for a Senior iOS engineer. If you’re eager to try the product, join their waitlist.

This one was especially fun for us as it’s the first investment we made out of our first fund — Adverb I. We are joined by Kindred Ventures, Ev Williams, Scott Belsky, and others.

Hear more about their vision, straight from the source.

April and Jessica