Former Sequoia Partner Amy Sun has already raised millions for her stealthy startup

Former Sequoia partner Amy Sun, who left the famed venture capital firm just months ago, has already raised $3.8 million for her new startup, Daylight Labs, SEC filings show.

Daylight Labs will be creating a solution to help gig economy workers make more money, Sun hints to TechCrunch. Still in the early product development stages, the startup began during the pandemic when Sun noticed how many industries were “completely decimated” by the crisis.

“How can you leverage technology to create new ways for people to earn to make a living,” she said. “We’re innovating on the actual format and product.”

There is no site or information available online about Daylight Labs, and Sun declined to comment on more specifics of the business, saying that the company is still iterating on its final product. What we do know, however, is that the company is a combination of all of Sun’s experiences in her career so far, from product management at Uber, to working on the Stories team at Facebook, to, most recently, investing in consumer companies on behalf of Sequoia Capital, which she joined in 2018.

Image Credits: Amy Sun

The Harvard grad started her career in product marketing at Microsoft, where she helped launch the Surface tablet. Sun then spent more than three years at Uber as a founding member of the ride-sharing companies growth marketing team, which included getting drivers to join the platform.

“Through that experience I got to build really strong relationships with drivers,” she said. “Seeing that you’re able to come into a city with a technology and people can start earning money, instantly — that’s really eye opening for me.” Notably, in California, the Uber and Lyft-backed Prop 22 bill passed, which allows gig workers to remain classified as independent contractors instead of full-time workers.

At Facebook, Sun worked on the company’s Stories product as a product manager. It’s unclear how her experience with consumer cameras and AR will be used within Daylight Labs, but that will definitely be interesting to track. During her tenure, users of Facebook Stories swelled from 2 million to 100 million.

Most recently, Sun worked at Sequoia Capital as the first woman on the firm’s growth stage team. Her portfolio included Noom, Aurora, Glossier, and The Wing, although she says she has transitioned “most responsibilities” from her tenure, including board seats, to the rest of the Sequoia team.

As for why leave the firm so soon after joining, Sun simply said that starting a company has “always been a dream” since the beginning of her career.

Since leaving Sequoia, Sun has lived a “nomadic lifestyle” with time in San Francisco, Boston, North Carolina, and more recently, Austin, Texas. Daylight Labs is based out of Austin, and Sun joins troves of entrepreneurs who have been moving to the area for years.

More to come on Daylight Labs when Sun is ready to share.

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