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Louis Markham
Founder & CEO @ Yuna | Ex-Loft | Ex-Bain
Louis Markham is the Founder and CEO of Yuna, an AI and storytelling startup that aims to motivate children globally to embrace reading.1 He founded Yuna with the vision of making reading the number one choice of entertainment for children around the world.1
Background and Education
Louis Markham received his education at The Wharton School2, which likely provided him with a strong business and entrepreneurial foundation.
Professional Experience
As the founder and CEO of Yuna, Louis is deeply involved in the company's operations and strategic direction. He ensures that Yuna stays on track to accomplish its mission of making reading more engaging and accessible for children.1 Under his leadership, Yuna has experienced significant growth, writing over 100,000 unique stories for 20,000 monthly active users in just five months.1
Yuna's Development
Louis Markham announced the creation of Yuna and its successful $1.6 million funding round in April 2024.3 The startup focuses on using artificial intelligence to create personalized stories for children, aiming to foster a love for reading and storytelling.1
Approach to Innovation
Louis has leveraged cutting-edge technology to merge traditional storytelling with artificial intelligence. This innovative approach allows Yuna to craft unique narratives from various perspectives, providing a fresh and dynamic literary experience for children.1
Vision for Impact
Under Louis's leadership, Yuna aims to shift the traditional view of childhood, seeing it as a vibrant period of play, learning, and imagination rather than just a transitional stage. The platform seeks to enhance access to literature and fiction in an engaging manner, fostering connections between children and their caregivers.1
Louis Markham's work with Yuna demonstrates his commitment to improving children's literacy and engagement with reading through innovative technological solutions.
Highlights
✨ Welcome to a new chapter in children's books ✨
By combining AI with the magic of human creativity, Yuna writes stories that are so personalised and interactive that they can be as engaging as any modern media platforms. Our vision? A world where reading is always the first choice of entertainment for children.
✨ I’m excited to announce what we’ve been working on for the last few months: the creation of Yuna, an AI and storytelling startup, and our $1.6 million dollar pre-seed round ✨
So what’s the story?
The sobering reality is that the magic of reading books is slowly being replaced by other forms of media. Each successive generation is enjoying fewer of the well known benefits that come with getting lost in a wonderful book (cognitive development, creativity, empathy, to name but a few).
What if we could reverse this trend? What if we could find a way to make reading just as ‘engaging’ as watching Netflix, and eventually the 1st entertainment choice for children?
And so we wrote Yuna into existence. By combining AI with the enchantment of human creativity, Yuna writes books that are so personalised and interactive that they can be as engaging as any modern media platforms. Leveraging AI to empower writers, illustrators and publishers, Yuna imagines new forms of storytelling:
✨ Imagine a book that every night writes the next chapter of a personalised adventure involving you, your daughter and dog, weaving your family’s interests into the narrative.
✨ Imagine a book that invites your niece to enter Hogwarts as a 1st year student and experience their own unique story through the wizarding world.
✨ Imagine a book that helps you discuss difficult topics with your son but in the form of an imaginary tale with him and his favourite character Snoopy.
Over time, we hope to make these dreams come true, all with a singular goal: to ensure that children build a healthy reading habit for life.
Thanks to the hard work of the incredible Yuna team, we’ve been testing early versions of these ideas. Over the past 5 months, Yuna has written 100,000+ unique stories to 20,000 monthly active users. And we are growing fast - we expect to write the next 100,000 books within a few weeks of this announcement. Thank you Yuna team - you are truly epic.
A massive thank you to the partners involved in our $1.6M pre-seed round: Canary who led and who have been incredible every day since (special shoutout to Florian Hagenbuch who has been a believer and mentor from day -1); The Positive Ventures team and angel investors who followed the round and recognised Yuna’s potential to make a positive impact on the world (thank you especially to Fábio Kestenbaum!). Finally - Taahir Munshi, Pedro Sônego de Oliveira, Flora Oliveira, Fabian Wikstrom and Carolina Guimarães, who played pivotal roles in turning Yuna from distant dream to reality during those early days.
Now what?
Today, we are launching our beta test product in Brazil in Portuguese. If you are in Brazil, please give it a shot (see link in comments). If you are not, Yuna isn’t available to test just yet, but fear not! Yuna is bringing its vision to the 🌎 very soon.
Want to learn more about Yuna? Check out the amazing articles by EXAME, Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios and Startups in the comments below.
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Mesh offers several powerful features including:
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Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
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Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
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Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
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