A breakthrough interface for thinking brilliantly together with AI

Announcing general availability of Cove and our $6M seed round led by Sequoia Capital

October 8, 2024

Today, we’re excited to introduce the world to Cove—a breakthrough interface for thinking brilliantly together with AI. We have raised a $6M seed round from world-class investors including Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil, Homebrew, Adverb, Common Metal, Scott Belsky, Lenny Rachitsky, Allie K. Miller and many more. The product is now generally available to all users.

Beyond the chatbot

Conversational agents such as ChatGPT have made hundreds of millions of people more productive. These chatbots are great at providing helpful answers to well-defined tasks—you can ask them to “suggest fun activities,” “write me an email,” or “find the problem with this code.”

But for more complex projects, the limits of the single-threaded chat UI become painfully apparent. Single-threaded chats are:

  • One-dimensional. Once you start, it’s hard to change direction and explore different ideas.
  • Temporary. Revisiting old chats is cumbersome, making it difficult to refine ideas over time.
  • Not editable. Instead of building directly on an AI’s ideas, you have to describe—or copy and paste—what you want to revise.
  • Unclear about context. Over a long conversation, a chatbot may struggle with which ideas to keep and which to discard.
  • Siloed. Without custom integration work, there’s no good way to use chatbots as part of a larger research project involving emails, CRM, or other tools

In short, these chats don’t mirror the messy, organic, nonlinear way our brains naturally solve problems—or the way we collaborate with other humans. We don’t try to plan a family vacation using only text messages, or do complex research using WhatsApp, or write a screenplay in Slack. To get on the same page, and to build on each other’s ideas, we use shared workspaces.

Why should collaborating with AI be any different?

We’ve seen this story before

In the computing devices of the early 1980s, command line interfaces were ubiquitous—but were inelegant for multitasking or editing complex spreadsheets or documents. Similarly, the early mobile devices of the 2000s were unwieldy for doing more than making phone calls.

In both cases, these pain points were solved with design—the GUI or the touchscreen. To unlock the full potential of the technology breakthrough, a design breakthrough was required.

Today, we are still in the “command line era” of AI. As large language models become more powerful, we need a new user interface to unleash their full range of capabilities.

Introducing Cove

Cove is a complete reimagining of how to interact with AI.

With Cove, content is no longer trapped in a chat thread or document editor. Instead, answers are arranged in a visual workspace. When you want to think big, the workspace expands to give you a wide open canvas; and when you want to work alongside your favorite web tools, Cove tucks into your browser’s sidebar. In the workspace, you can add text, tables, images, webpages, and PDFs—each element becomes shared context between you and the AI.

All content is directly editable by both you and your AI collaborator, so you can build off each other’s ideas. Cove’s AI can even make precise edits without having to re-stream a whole answer. Cove has access to the latest information from the web, and can do many web searches in parallel—imagine tables that fill themselves with fresh data. At each stage of your journey, Cove suggests many possible next steps, so you’re never stuck.

Cove fits how you work. With our Chrome extension, no special integration is needed to use Cove alongside all your favorite websites and apps—email, docs, CRM, and more. You can ask Cove anything about a web page, collect and compare information from multiple pages as you browse, or clip content into your workspace.

In Cove, AI adapts to your thought process, freeing you to explore new connections and reach unexpected places. It makes thinking fun. Early users have used Cove for projects such as planning their kid’s birthday party, writing business plans, building exercise and meal routines, researching sales prospects, finding a new job, and designing home renovations. They’ve described it as “a jetpack for my thinking,” “makes chatbots feel claustrophobic,” and “the right way to work with AI.” We hope you feel the same way, and that Cove becomes the thought partner you rely on for all your projects, big and small.

Introducing Cove - A Visual Workspace For Thinking With AI - YouTube

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Introducing Cove - A Visual Workspace For Thinking With AI

Our team

Cove is a group of zero-to-one product builders who pride ourselves on delivering complex technologies in simple packages. Our co-founders, Andy, Mike, and Stephen, met as early team members of Google Maps, where they built elegant experiences that are used by billions. Stephen and Andy were also founding members of Uber Eats, where they started out hand-delivering sandwiches before scaling the business globally to tens of billions of dollars. Mike is a serial entrepreneur who has deep experience in AI and Machine Learning and most recently helped found and scale Stripe Identity. Our growing crew of engineers have been instrumental in these and many other groundbreaking projects.

We are just getting started

Cove is powered by a combination of Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, and Perplexity. We’re excited to see how advancements in LLMs enable us to further innovate on human–AI collaboration.

Starting today Cove is available to all users—you can try it out now at Cove.ai. We can’t wait to see what you do with your new AI thought partner.

Happy Thinking,

The Cove Team