Shortly after the end of Super Bowl LII, the NBC broadcast of the game showed a video of Lauren May jumping for joy and screaming at the top of her lungs. May, as far as we know, is not an Eagles fan. Rather, the cause of her elation was the live streaming app HQ, through which she won $11.30 during a trivia round last month. May’s freakout, recorded and uploaded to Twitter, was the centerpiece in HQ’s surprise Super Bowl ad, which aired just days after Recode reported that the app had secured an additional $15 million in funding.
According to Bloomberg, NBC provided HQ’s parent company, Intermedia Labs, with free postgame airtime. It’s not clear why the HQ owner received a spot on the house, though Bloomberg believes the deal could signal additional partnerships between Intermedia and NBCUniversal. The ad shows about 15 seconds of May’s celebration — which came after she correctly answered 12 trivia questions in a row during one of HQ’s twice-daily games — before cutting to the app’s logo.
Watching Lauren May’s roller coaster of emotions as she realized she’s won $11.30 playing @hqtrivia yesterday was a truly epic start to the new year @ScottRogowsky @L_M_A_Y @megmk #HQTrivia pic.twitter.com/GtH4nCG2w7
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— Avery Armour (@averyarmour) January 2, 2018
Even before making its unexpected Big Game appearance, HQ had already drawn headlines during Super Bowl weekend. The app’s $15 million injection of capital, which values it at more than $100 million, will be led by Cyan Banister of the Founders Fund, a VC firm founded by controversial billionaire Peter Thiel. Upon hearing that Thiel may now have stake in their favorite trivia app, some of HQ’s players took to Twitter to voice their discontent.
Thiel or no Thiel, the Founders Fund investment is big for HQ, which will need to keep raising money if it’s going to continue giving away thousands of dollars every day. At one point, Recode reported that investors had soured on HQ, owing in part to alleged bad behavior by the app’s co-founder Colin Kroll. Clearly, there’s still significant interest in the trendy platform, and its executives, like Lauren May, should be jumping for joy.
