The rise of LLMs has undoubtedly changed the world and the way we work. With the superpowers of knowledge, summarization and synthesis at our fingertips, it’s easy to imagine a future where every person has a digital assistant. 

However, the user interface for that future has a long way to go. Today, using an AI chatbot can feel less like having an assistant, and more like visiting an oracle—someone who knows a lot about the world, but less about you. An executive assistant or chief of staff, on the other hand, can easily access your inbox, files and docs; can take detailed notes; can retain important context about your projects; and can not just tell you exactly how to do a task, but actually do it, too. LLMs are brilliant in many ways, but they still leave a lot to be desired in terms of productivity—especially for more complex tasks.

So what would a better AI assistant look like? Ideally, it would be easy to summon to the space where you’re already working, such as your inbox or browser. It would see what you see, and incorporate information from that shared context. It would take notes, write documents, populate spreadsheets. It would do the work alongside you, collaborating and iterating as your project evolves. 

That’s exactly what Cove co-founders Stephen Chau, Andy Szybalski and Mike Chu are building. Cove is an AI thought partner that helps you think brilliantly, breaking out of chat threads and into a shared visual workspace. It can follow you across your desktop, your email and your web browser, via a Chrome extension. It can summarize long articles and clip notes, ingest documents from your desktop, and find new data online. It can fill in the blanks, working alongside you to do web searches and fill in empty cells of tables. It is truly collaborative, not only making smart suggestions to complete your tasks, but actually helping you complete them.

What excites me most about Cove is the team. I had the privilege of working with Stephen, Andy and Mike as a product manager in the early days of Google Maps, and I saw firsthand their ability to create beautiful consumer products—at the cutting edge of both what’s technically possible and what’s easily usable. Stephen and Andy went on to be founding members of Uber Eats, which they helped scale to a global business, while Mike did the same with Stripe Identity. Their track record shows: If AI has a UI problem, they are a great team to fix it.

We at Sequoia are proud to partner with them and lead Cove’s seed round. With today’s announcement of general availability, the product, which is currently in beta, will no doubt evolve rapidly alongside AI capabilities. We can’t wait to see what Stephen, Andy, Mike and their team do next—and what you do and Cove do together.