Brynn Putnam, the founder behind the connected fitness startup Mirror, is back with a new startup: a tech-powered gaming console that combines the best of board games and video games, called Board.
After selling Mirror to Lululemon for $500 millio in 2020, Putnam returned to entrepreneurship to create an entirely new product, which she unveiled Tuesday for the first time at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference in San Francisco.
Like Mirror, Board taps into elements of the real world and the digital one.
The device offers a gaming platform, designed for friends and family to gather around, like a board game. However, the game board itself is a screen that recognizes touches, gestures, as well as physical objects.
This 24-inch screen is housed in a wood-finish frame. This size allows four to six people to sit around playing games, the founder said.
At launch, the $500 product comes with 12 launch games and 50 game pieces.
Over time, Putnam said AI will be used to customize the device to the user.
“We’re really excited about the long-term power of AI to personalize the experiences on the device. So you can imagine vision and voice inputs, storylines that are adaptive, dynamic environments, accessibility features — like translation and voice-to-text,” she said. “Over time, AI really makes anyone able to create on board. So Board becomes more than a game console. It becomes a place for creative self-expression.”
To create the first games, the startup’s internal game studio partnered with external developers. But the longer-term plan is for more developers to build for the platform in the future. The company also plans to offer an app store where others will be able to bring their own experiences to Board.
Board is backed by Lerer Hippeau, the VC firm that led Mirror’s $3 million seed round, as well as First Round and Box Group. To date, it’s raised $15 million and is raising a Series A.
Asked how she landed on gaming for her next idea, Putnam replied, “I think that play is just universal … With fitness, not everyone loves working out, and not everyone loves working out at home, but play really unites us. It’s sort of this universal language that connects us and brings us together,” she said.
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