Announcing Lex’s $2.75m Seed Round, Led by True Ventures

Today is a big day here at Every! We have a couple of announcements:

• We’ve spun out Lex (our AI-powered word processor) to become its own company, which Nathan will lead as CEO.
• True Ventures is leading a $2.75 million seed round in Lex.
• Dan will continue leading Every, and we’ll keep publishing great writing—including occasionally by Nathan!—to your inbox every day.

Phew, that was a lot of news. 😅

The road to Lex

Hi! Nathan here. Nine months ago, when I started building Lex, I really did not have any of this in mind.

I had just come back from paternity leave, my first real break from work since we started the business, and while I was out changing diapers and warming bottles, I often found myself thinking about software. Specifically, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I missed making it. So, when I came back, I started day-dreaming about side projects I could build that would somehow fit in at Every.

My first idea was a text-based version of BeReal, where once a day users would get a prompt like, “What’s your worst food-related opinion?” But after two days of delusion I accepted the obvious conclusion that this was a terrible idea and had no connection to our newsletter business. I considered building a little tool for editing podcast episodes that would enable uploading an MP3 to a webpage that could be shared, where anyone could leave timestamped comments. This was better, but I decided against it since we weren’t editing our podcast episodes much anyway. Every’s main focus was, is, and likely always will be: writing. It was this thought that led me to Lex.

Over the past three years, I spent nearly every day in Google Docs, either writing my own posts or editing someone else’s. This was a new and honestly frustrating experience. Prior to this, my work had been writing code and designing interfaces. The tools for engineers and designers are wildly better than those for writers. I can only compare it to my first years out of college, when I was designing in Photoshop and writing my backend as ~5,000 lines of spaghetti code in a single index.php file. During my time at Every, I’ve had a lot of ideas for how to make it better.