Today we are excited to welcome Ashley Sumner and Quilt to the Mayfield family.
Quilt is the audio social network for live, supportive, feel good conversations—created to re-humanize social media and make it feel safe and inclusive for all.
We are long audio as the next substrate for building community. Curiously, while modalities like text, photo, and video created big platforms, audio lagged as Apple underinvested in podcasts, until the launch of Airpods in 2015 and a subsequent explosion in listening created a whole new user behavior for the masses.
Podcasts managed to do what seemed impossible a few years ago, creating new media time in our lives, a new companion for driving, dishes, or exercise. More personal, real and revealing than a tweet or post, and less obtrusive and image-conscious than photo or video, audio’s atomic unit is the intimate conversation.
Which is of course the perfect antidote to social media’s worst vices. In the hands of the right founder, audio (and perhaps only audio) can be harnessed to create a new kind of social media experience: authentic, supportive, informative, hilarious, and essential. And after two decades of social media companies channeling some of the baser instincts of masculine energy into the fabric of our digital lives, perhaps an inclusive platform rooted in positive feminine energy is just what we need.
Enter Ashley Sumner and Quilt. Ashley has spent nearly a decade building authentic communities that straddle offline and online realms, culminating in Quilt’s 1.0 product which brought together women for thousands of in-person sessions for connection, learning, and support. When Covid struck, the needs of her community to connect only intensified, but few options existed to bring one’s whole real self to the party.
Quilt 2.0 launched as a Testflight app in August 2020, and despite the company needing to manually onboard every user, Quilters immediately made the platform their own, creating five-hour brunches, new weekly bathing rituals, psychic readings, group coaching, and dance parties, all to support their evolving identities as they explored this crazy new thing: a platform that always leaves you feeling better than when you came in.
At Mayfield we search for entrepreneurs who not only want to change the world, but also do so in a way that furthers human and planetary evolution. Ashley and her team are doing just that, and when we saw the strength of the community and the unique culture being built on Quilt, we had to partner with her and lead her seed round.
As a People First firm, we embrace backing consumer founders from inception, believing that in time great people will build great products and companies. Ashley joins our growing cadre of tremendous consumer founders we partner with at the earliest of stages, including founding investments in Poshmark, Tonal, Oliver Space, and TRIPP. We are grateful to partner with existing investors Kent Goldman (Upside VC) and Jenny Lefcourt (Freestyle) as well as an incredible group of close advisors including Bangaly Kaba, Eros Remini, Crystal Widjaja, and others. Most importantly, we are thrilled to champion this crucial mission with the opportunity to impact so many lives. Try it out for yourself — there’s much more to come!
