At launch, Bright boasts over 200 hosts, whose source of fame and following spans the traditional to the digital. Madonna, Ashton Kutcher, Amy Schumer, the D'Amelio Sisters, Judd Apatow and Deepak Chopra are among current instructors.
"At YouTube, we saw that 20% of video views were learning content from individual creators," Powers said in a statement. "There is an incredible appetite to learn from other people and I wanted to develop a platform that provided more interaction and intimacy."
Initial courses include a "Tell Your Story" guest interview program hosted by actress Laura Dern and "Champions Talk" with basketball analyst Kenny Smith, who will interview athletes about their competitive psychology. The stars of reality show "Property Brothers" offer a course on home design, and Ronnie2K — known for offering tips for winning video games — offers tips on how to build a gaming career.
Hosts on Bright will develop a curriculum and set the schedule, class-size and price, of which Bright will take a 20% cut. Courses will fall into one of six categories: body, mind, culture, home, money and craft.
The company was founded in mid-2020. Oseary's Sound Ventures, which he co-founded with Ashton Kutcher, is the lead investor. RIT Capital, Norwest, Globo and Slow Ventures also participated in the seed round. The company did not disclose how much it has raised.
There's no shortage of competing platforms. MasterClass also sells celebrity-led courses, and just raised a $100 million Series E round of funding. Bright is seeking to differentiate itself by offering live, interactive sessions it bills as more akin to conversations, and Oseary is leveraging his rolodex to power the company.
Powers, intimately familiar with Google-owned YouTube, thinks Bright can provide a boost to creators and celebrities that other platforms cannot.
"The fact that creators don't even know who their core audience is, because these ad-driven platforms won't tell them, means they can't take their business to the next level," he said.
In addition to its 200 initial hosts, Bright says it has over 1,500 more on its waitlist. Apart from a handful of them who are company advisors, they did not receive financial incentives to join.
Bright is the L.A.-based brainchild of Guy Oseary (right) — investor and music manager for acts including Madonna and U2 — and Michael Powers, who was behind YouTube "channels."
Instead, Powers said, what attracted them is the opportunity to expand their business of being a celebrity and strengthen their fan relationships. When Bright users opt-in to updates about a host's courses, they also consent to sending their contact information.
"That allows the creators to then take those people to their mailing list. They can take them to their Shopify shop," said Powers. "Whatever they have going on in their business, they can connect those people into that bigger universe of things they're doing."
It's a contrast to what many other video platforms do, particularly those whose business is selling ads.
"When you have an ad-driven platform from the beginning, the ownership of the relationship of your audience is fundamentally with the platform," said Powers.
"Is a Google sales team going to truly value an individual high-profile creator on their platform?" he added, implying their primary constituent of interest is the advertiser.
Bright is built atop Zoom, using the video chat company's software development kit through its partnership program. Bright will add customized features that, for example, allow hosts to invite users to speak with them "on stage."
Working under Powers, who will be Bright's CEO, is a team with experience at numerous tech companies, including Caffeine, Instagram, Pinterest, Apple and Facebook.
"I was there at the beginning of the creative economy coming in on YouTube," said Powers, "and now it's time for them to go even further."
"As you're on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit, we serve you up with micro moments of learning," said co-founder and CEO Taylor Nieman. She and Brandon Dietz, Toucan's co-founder and chief product officer, were early employees at Headspace before it closed over $30 million in its Series A in 2015.
"Back in the day we changed our Facebook feeds to Spanish or our iPhone settings to Portuguese," Nieman said. "But with that full 100% immersion, your brain thinks 'What the heck is happening?' and you revert back to English. It's too much."
Instead of operating through a separate app for daily lessons and quizzes — like Duolingo's model — Toucan meets consumers wherever they're working online. It's an approach to education technology that co-founders Nieman, Dietz and Shuan Merritt, a former software developer at car-shopping app Fair, thought of after years working in consumer technology.
"These highly motivated people that are opening an app for 15 minutes every day are the 1% of learners," the chief executive said of traditional language app users. "It is the 99% of users that have tuned out of those apps that we're really excited to cater to."
The global edtech market is estimated to hit $404 billion by 2025, according to data from Pitchbook. In 2020, companies like Coursera and Masterclass closed deals at $130 and $100 million respectively.
Toucan users can hover their cursor over each translated word for a recorded pronunciation and its definition. The basic service for Google Chrome and Safari is free, but Toucan also sells a premium version that translates more words per page and lets users save words to review later.
To make extra revenue, the startup also launched a feature for users and companies to "own" words for $1 each month, which links to their URL each time the word shows up for a Toucan user. "Coffee," for example is owned by the daily newsletter Morning Brew and Headspace owns "meditation."
The 12-person team plans to hire and expand its language offerings by the end of next month. Also slated to arrive in early May is a Spanish-to-English translation option, which will propel the company into international markets. Eventually, Nieman said the company will start "dabbling in mobile" to explore how Toucan's tech can layer on top of social and messaging apps.
LightShed Ventures led the round, along with new investors Next Play Ventures, Concrete Rose Capital, GingerBread Capital, Form Capital, Goodwater Capital, Hampton VC, Spacecadet Ventures, GTMfund, Baron Davis Enterprises and Human Ventures. Existing investors GSV Ventures, Amplifyher Ventures and Vitalize also contributed.