Dissatisfied with the tools available for distributed work, maker Kaspars Dancis founded Whimsical in 2017.

The platform’s collaboration tools include flowcharts, wireframes, mind maps, sticky notes, and syncable documents — in an effort to end app-switching and challenge spreadsheet and slide deck dominance in remote team workflows.

Whimsical raised $30M in a Series A funding round in November 2021, with angel investments from GitHub’s CEO and COO, Stripe’s CPO, and Dropbox’s co-founder.

Today, the Whimsical team is launching Whimsical AI for Mind Maps in beta: an integration to the core product that generates ideas for mind maps, in response to simple text prompts.

Say you're thinking about building a fitness app. 

Whimsical AI can help you come up with a name for your product, logo ideas, brand values, and potential buyer personas.

Using the provided suggestions, users can generate ideas and conduct research without ever leaving the app or losing their train of thought.

Mind mapping as a tool for ideation and visual thinking was popularized by pop psychology author Tony Buzan in the 1970s. The first evidence of humans using this technique to understand and map complex information, however, dates back to as early as the 3rd century.

Porphyry of Tyre, a Greek philosopher born in 234 CE is credited with creating the earliest known mind map in the form of the Porphyrian tree (see below), which was a way to classify Aristotle’s Categories in a logical process.

As aforementioned, Whimsical’s platform includes not only (now AI-integrated) mind-mapping functionality, but also tools to create user journeys, mockups, actionable sticky notes, and more — collaboration elements the team call “primitives.”

The company’s goal is to make remote work better than being in the same room, and what sets the product apart — other than their new AI-powered suggestions for mind mapping — is how these “primitives” sync up with one another to create more collaborative visual workspaces. (For example: users can connect product requirement documents to wireframe mockups.)

The Whimsical team is open to feedback on Whimsical AI for Mind Maps as well as “any other ideas you have for how we could apply AI to our products in the future.”

Pitch in here. 💬