There has been a lot of discussion about building context for AI systems. In consumer software, we’ve seen startups build around search, documents, and conferencing. They all want to capture context from your digital life, provide connections to other tools, and allow you to query all that data. Some tools are more advanced. For example, Rewind (which became Limitless and was sold to Meta) and Microsoft Recall aim to help you capture and remember everything that happens on your screen.
A new startup called Littlebird is trying to do something similar with a slightly different approach. While apps like Rewind save screenshots or some kind of visual data, Littlebird “reads” the screen and saves the context in text format.
The core idea of this product is that since the screen is always being read, there is no need to provide additional context for productivity. The startup believes that while many AI tools try to distract users, Littlebird can work in the background and only appear when the user wants it to.
When you set up Littlebird on your computer, you can customize which apps you want the app to ignore and not capture any context. The startup says it automatically ignores sensitive fields on web forms, including password managers and passwords and credit card information. You can also choose to associate other apps with the app, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Reminders.
The app allows you to ask questions about your data and provides pre-generated prompts to get you started, such as “What did I do today?” or “What types of emails are important to me?” After using it for a few days, I noticed that these prompts became more personalized over time.
Littlebird also has a built-in note taker similar to Granola that uses system audio and runs in the background to capture meeting content and create notes and action items based on it. When you open a meeting in detailed view, there is an option called “Prepare Meeting” that provides detailed information about the meeting, taking into account the context of past meetings, emails, company records, etc. The feature also pulls information from sources like Reddit to tell you what users think about a particular product or company.
Another tool called Routines provides detailed prompts for Littlebird to run at recurring intervals, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. The company lists several routines you can use right away, including daily briefings, weekly activity summaries, and yesterday’s task summaries. Users can also create their own routines with personalized instructions.
Littlebird was founded in 2024 by Alap Shah, Naman Shah, and Alexander Green. Brothers Alap and Naman founded Sentieo, a platform for institutional investors, which was sold to market intelligence company AlphaSense. They previously co-founded a health food company called Thistle. Alap was also co-author of the viral Citrini paper on how AI agents could destroy the economy, which sent various technology stock prices down. Green has built a variety of companies in hardware, software, and AI.
“We started when Alap raised the interesting problem that AI poses about your (user) data. The model doesn’t know anything about you, and this limits its usefulness. We were thinking about the different UI and OS paradigms that are likely to be disrupted by AI and that started Littlebird as a project,” Green said in a call with TechCrunch.
Green pointed out that Rewind is similar to what Littlebird is trying to do, but relies on screenshots and doesn’t provide a great search experience. He said the startup is just getting started and there are more problems to solve, including making large-scale language models (LLMs) understand different kinds of context about users.
Littlebird allows users to delete their data at any time, and the data is encrypted and stored in the cloud. Green said the reason for storing data in the cloud is to run powerful models for a variety of AI workflows that aren’t possible locally.
“We don’t store visual information. We only store text, so it’s much lighter on the data. I think that’s probably another reason why Recall and Rewind struggled, because taking a screenshot requires a lot more data. I also think it’s more invasive,” he said.
Littlebird is free to download and use, but for more usage restrictions and access to features like image creation, users can pay for plans starting at $20 per month.
The startup raised $11 million in funding led by Lotus Studio with participation from Lenny Rachitsky, Scott Belsky, Gokul Rajaram, Justin Rosenstein, Shawn Wang, and Russ Heddleston.
Some of these investors are regular users of the product. Rajaram, who has worked on advertising products at Google and Facebook, said the product removes the friction of remembering, searching and retelling one’s work. Heddleston, DocSend co-founder and CEO, said he used the tool and rewrote his company’s marketing site using contexts such as meetings, email, and Notion.
Rachitsky, who runs his own newsletter and podcast, said AI is only as good as its context, and it misses a lot about the day. He said he asks tools to help him improve his productivity workflow and become happier. He said that for long-term success, a product must find a killer use case.
“I think it’s all about finding the essential use cases. That’s all that matters to the success of this product right now. I know a lot of people have already discovered that on their own, and the team is drawing on that experience as we see those use cases emerge,” he said.
“We’ve had a lot of AI product creators 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 launch it. The strategy is to launch the product early, see how people use it, and then double down on those use cases rather than wait until it’s fully figured out.”
