Manu Kumar has had a fixation with business cards since he was a child.
When he ran his first company, he ended up with a stack of business cards on his desk. That stack inspired him to start a company called CardMunch Inc. that offered an app that scanned business cards and added them to users' address books. Unfortunately, while LinkedIn acquired the company in 2011, it discontinued the service soon after.
That left Kumar, a serial entrepreneur and investor, feeling disappointed about what could have been. He dreamed of people swapping business and personal cards on their phones, their visages animated like the magical photos in the Harry Potter books and movies. He wasn't about to let that dream die.
"The only option was for me to start the company and just do it," Kumar said.
So in 2018, he founded HiHello Inc. to bring his vision for digital business cards to life. HiHello, which is based in Palo Alto, launched its own business card app in 2019.
As did CardMunch's app before it, HiHello's allows users to scan physical business cards and add the contact information to their address books. With HiHello's app they can also send digital business cards they've created in it to others via email or text messages. People who don't have the app can still get a copy of another person's HiHello business card by scanning a QR code attached to it.
Although other companies offer apps that are built around the concept of digitizing business cards, HiHello offers some other features that make its service stand out. For example, users can create different cards for each of their personas or groups of contacts, offering different ones to people they know from work and to people they know in their personal lives.
HiHello, which has 12 employees, operates on a freemium business model. It offers its app with basic features for free to everyone. It charges for extra services, such as the ability to created an unlimited number of digital cards, design them with custom colors or sync address book entries with Outlook or Google Contacts. The startup also offers plans for companies and teams of people.
Covid-19 offered a challenge and an opportunity
The company has done well enough to attract about $10.25 million in venture capital. It raised $7.5 million of that from Foundry Group, Lux Capital, August Capital and other investors in a Series A round in July.
The Covid-19 pandemic hit HiHello hard, because it put a stop to most of the networking events where people meet and exchange cards.
"Our product was really designed at that time for people meeting someone in person," said Kumar, who is HiHello's CEO.
His company adapted by creating some new product features. One of those lets users create custom Zoom backgrounds that include a QR code that points to their HiHello business cards.
Ironically, the pandemic also helped spark an uptick in usage of its app around October, Kumar said. Concerns about spreading the coronavirus had sparked a demand for so-called contactless transactions, where people can exchange information or make purchases without touching the same surface. That trend helped give HiHello's app a boost.
The app now has users in 147 different countries, and in the past 12 months, people have viewed HiHello business cards 1.5 million times. The app has become popular with younger professionals, including high school and college students, Kumar said.
"When you think of folks who've grown up with Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, they get the concept right away," Kumar said. "'Why would we even use paper business cards?' is the response from those people."
