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There was a lot of talk about construction The context of artificial intelligence systems. In the consumer software space, we have seen the creation of startups Searching, Documentsand Meetings. They all want to capture context from your digital life, provide connections to other tools, and let you query all that data. Some tools went even further. For example, Rewind (which has become limitless and Sold to Meta) and Microsoft Recall aim to capture everything that happens on your screen and help you remember everything.
A new startup company called Little Bird It tries something similar with a slightly different approach. While apps like Rewind store screenshots or some type of visual data, Littlebird “reads” the screen and stores the context in text format.
The basic idea behind the product is that since it is reading your screen all the time, you don’t need to provide additional context for productivity. The startup believes that while a lot of AI tools try to distract you, Littlebird can run in the background and can only appear when you want it to.
When you set up Littlebird on your computer, you can customize which applications you want the app to ignore and not capture any context. The startup said it automatically ignores password managers and sensitive fields on web forms such as passwords and credit card details. You can choose to link other apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Reminders to the app as well.
The app lets you ask questions about your data, and offers pre-created prompts to get you started, such as “What was I doing today?” or “What kind of emails are important to me?” Within a couple of days of use, I noticed that these prompts became more personalized over time.
Littlebird also has a built-in Granola-like notation tool that uses system audio and runs in the background to capture transcripts from meetings and create notes and action items based on that. When you open a meeting in the detailed view, there is an option called “Prepare for Meeting” that takes the context of previous meetings, emails, and company history into account to provide you with more details about the meeting. The feature also fetches information from sources like Reddit to let you know what users think about a particular product or company.
Another tool called Routines provides detailed prompts to run Littlebird at frequent intervals, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. The company lists some ready-to-use actions such as daily briefing, weekly activity summary, and yesterday’s work summary. Users can create their own routines as well with custom instructions.
Littlebird was founded by Alap Shah, Noman Shah and Alexander Green in 2024. The brothers Alap and Naman founded Sentieo, a platform for institutional investors, which was sold to market intelligence company AlphaSense. They also previously co-founded a health food company called Thistle. Alap was also a co-author of Citrini’s widely read paper on how AI agents are destroying the economy, which It led to a decline in various technology stocks. Green has built several companies in hardware, software, and artificial intelligence.
“We started when Alap brought up an interesting problem that AI would be tied to (users’) data. The models don’t know anything about you, and that limits their usefulness. We were thinking about different UI and OS models that could potentially be ripe for disruption with AI and that started Littlebird as a project,” Green told TechCrunch over a phone call.
Green noted that although Rewind was close to what Littlebird was trying to do, it relied on screenshots and didn’t have a great search experience. The startup is just getting started, he said, and there are many problems to solve, including making large language models (LLMs) understand different types of context about users.
With Littlebird, users can remove their data at any time, and their data is stored in the cloud with encryption. Green said the rationale behind storing data in the cloud is to run robust models of various AI workflows, which is not possible locally.
“We don’t store any visual information. We just store text, which makes the data much lighter. I think that’s probably another reason why Recall and Rewind struggle, which is that taking a screenshot is a lot more data-hungry. I also think it’s more intrusive.”
Littlebird is free to download and use, but for more usage limits and access to features like image creation, users can pay for plans starting at $20 per month.
The startup has raised $11 million in funding led by Lotus Studio, with participation from Lenny Rachitsky, Scott Belsky, Gokul Rajaram, Justin Rosenstein, Shawn Wang, and Ross Hiddleston.
Many of these investors are regular users of the product. The product removes the friction of remembering, recalling and re-explaining your work, said Rajaram, who has worked at Google and Facebook on advertising products. Heddleston, co-founder and CEO of DocSend, said he rewrote the company’s marketing website with the tool, using context from meetings, email, Notion and more.
AI is only as good as the context it’s in, and it misses a lot from your day, said Rachitsky, who runs his own newsletter and podcast. He said he asks the tool about improving his productive workflow and feeling happier. To achieve long-term success, the product will need to find a killer use case, he said.
“I think it’s all about finding that killer use case. That’s all that matters for the success of this product right now. I know a lot of people have already figured that out for themselves, and the team is building on those experiences when they see those use cases emerge.”
“I’ve had a lot of AI product builders on the podcast, and the most consistent theme is that you don’t really know how people are going to use your product until you release it. The strategy is to roll out things early, see how people are using them, and maximize those use cases versus waiting until something is fully discovered.”