After a very profitable decade on Microsoft’s board, Reid Hoffman is stepping down, the company announced Thursday. Hoffman joined the board after Microsoft bought his company LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016.

Hoffman was on Microsoft’s board when it invested its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. Hoffman was one of OpenAI’s original investors and served on the model maker’s board until he stepped down in 2023, citing too many potential conflicts of interest to continue. He was also on Microsoft’s board when the tech giant entered into one of those non-acquisition, acqui-hire deals for $650 million with his AI startup Inflection AI. Microsoft hired Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman through that deal.

Hoffman said on a recent episode of his “Possible” podcast, while talking with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, that he’s ready to go “founder mode” with his latest AI startup, Manus. Manus is a drug discovery company that raised over $50 million through a couple of seed rounds last year. Hoffman is an investor, as is General Catalyst.

Hoffman is cited as a co-founder of Manus and chairman of the board, not the CEO, though. That job belongs to Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the 2011 book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.”

Still, Hoffman said he’s excited to give Manus more attention.

“One of the things I realized over the last month was that, we’re seeing such progress with Manus. I need to get back to founder mode,” he said. He believes the startup is making progress on “Move 37” AI, meaning AI that supersedes human creativity in chemistry, especially to combat various cancers, he added.

Board, the three-year-old, New York-based startup building what it calls “together tech” — tech designed to bring people physically into the same room — has closed a $20 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures.

General Partner Michael Mignano, in his first investment since joining USV, will join the company’s board of directors. The round also brought in some famous angel investors including Biz Stone, Tim Ferriss, and Scott Belsky.

The raise comes about eight months after founder Brynn Putnam — who previously sold connected fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million — unveiled Board publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt last October.

The Board device is a 24-inch touchscreen in a wood-finish frame that uses proprietary technology to recognize physical game pieces, blending the tactile feel of board games with the interactivity of video games.

Traction since launch has been strong, the company says: Board is now in tens of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals, and restaurants across all 50 states, with 85% of customers averaging 30 or more play sessions per month.

Alongside the funding, Board announced Board Studio, an AI-powered creation platform launching later this year that will let anyone build original games using natural language prompts — from idea to playable prototype in under an hour, it says.

Board had previously raised $15 million in funding led by the venture firm Lerer Hippeau, which had also led Mirror’s $3 million seed round years earlier. That was a bet that paid off handsomely when Putnam sold the connected fitness company to Lululemon in 2020.

Putnam sees Board as a natural extension of what she learned about consumer hardware while building Mirror. “Mirror was very much about me,” she once told TechCrunch. “It was my reflection, my performance, it was about making your own self better. At that next phase, my life was really just much more about my family and my friends and my relationships.”

The result is a product built around the simple but increasingly popular idea that the best use of tech might be to get people to put their devices down and look each other in the face.

The raise arrives at a moment when consumer tech, long out of favor with investors, is showing signs of bouncing back, driven in large part by what AI is making newly possible.

“I’m more excited about consumer than I’ve been in a long time,” said Ben Lerer, managing partner of Lerer Hippeau, late last year during a separate sit-down with TechCrunch. “We’re seeing a very high-quality group of founders saying, ‘Now’s the time to get back in the pool.’ There are things that are possible today that weren’t possible six months ago or a year ago, and the slope is steep.”