Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz & Others Put $1.8M Into Aviate, An Intelligent Homescreen For Android

Facebook is not the only company to invest in development of products that take better advantage of the Android homescreen. South Korean messaging app?KakaoTalk also recently announced its intentions to release a rival Android launcher. And now,??Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others have invested $1.8 million into Aviate, an ex-Googler backed intelligent homescreen for Android devices. The round also included?participation from Freestyle Capital, Draper Associates, and other angels, most notably?Dan Rose, Facebook VP of Business Development and Monetization, and Keval Desai. The company actually closed on the funding in December, but is only announcing now. The funds will be used to grow the team quickly, and further develop the product. The company behind Aviate,?Palo Alto-based ThumbsUp Labs, was founded in November 2011 by a team with backgrounds in computer science, search and OS development. Co-founder Mark Daiss majored in Cognitive Science at the University of California, and previously founded Pupil, an image based Q&A app, where he also focused on the problem of bringing relevant information to smartphone users when it was most useful. Meanwhile, Stanford grad Will Choi worked for Google on its front-end search team; and Paul Montoy-Wilson, also a Stanford grad, worked as a Product Manager for the Android Marketplace (now Google Play), and had previously co-founded customer feedback app HaveASec. Each founder had his own take on how to make mobile phones more effective – Daiss having seen the app discovery and engagement challenges firsthand; Montoy-Wilson with insight into the Android ecosystem itself; and Choi coming at the problem from the search?perspective – he wanted to rebuild mobile search from the ground up. What Aviate Does With the Aviate, the goal is to help mobile users de-clutter their Android homescreens, and instead view relevant information adapted to their surroundings, rather than a grid of apps. Where Facebook Home has taken over the Android environment as something of an “apperating system,” to use the term coined by Wired?(referring to something in between an app and operating system),?the team at Aviate believes there’s more that can be done with such technology, beyond simply optimizing your social networking experiences. Users today have a number of mobile applications on their devices which they access regularly, and that serve a wide variety of functions. It may not make much sense to give over complete control to just one, such as is the case with Facebook Home. (Early adopters of Facebook Home

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