Evernote founder's Mmhmm, a video service that works with Zoom, Teams, and Webex and can add effects to calls, raises $100M led by SoftBank's Vision Fund
When Phil Libin created note-taking app Evernote in 2007, he was making a bet that smartphones would be the next big thing.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Phil Libin's second act after stepping down as Evernote CEO and joining General Catalyst in 2015: instead of building another standalone productivity app like Evernote, Mmhmm positions itself as a layer on top of the meeting incumbents — Zoom, Teams, and Webex — adding effects and presentation polish to calls rather than replacing them.
The $100M round led by SoftBank's Vision Fund matters because of what came before at Evernote: after years of leadership churn and rebuilds under Ian Small, the note-taking pioneer ultimately agreed to be sold to Bending Spoons. The Vision Fund is now backing the founder's bet that the next category winner sits above the conference-call pipe, not inside it.
First-order effects
- SoftBank's Vision Fund adds a founder-led video-effects company to its portfolio with $100M of runway, while Mmhmm gains the capital to scale its overlay across Zoom, Teams, and Webex users.
Second-order effects
- Zoom, Microsoft, and Cisco's Webex now face a familiar platform question: whether to tolerate third-party layers enriching their calls or absorb those features natively, which would squeeze Mmhmm's wedge.
Third-order effects
- If the overlay model holds, value in video communication migrates from owning the meeting infrastructure to owning the content-and-presentation layer on top of it — the inverse of Evernote's standalone-app playbook.
The trend: Video conferencing is stratifying into commodity call infrastructure below and venture-backed content layers above, with founders like Libin betting the margin lives in the layer.