Cove recently announced the completion of a $6 million seed round financing, with investors including Sequoia Capital, renowned investor Elad Gil, Homebrew, and others. This AI startup, founded by former core members of the Google Maps team, is dedicated to developing a new generation of intelligent workspaces aimed at addressing the limitations of current AI conversational tools in complex project collaboration.
Beyond ChatGPT: The Need for New Breakthroughs in AI Collaboration
With the popularity of large language models like ChatGPT, AI assistants have become essential tools in daily work. However, the limitations of existing AI chat tools are increasingly evident in practical applications. The single-threaded dialogue mode struggles to support multi-directional thinking, historical records are hard to trace, content is difficult to edit in real-time, long-term project context management is challenging, and collaboration with mainstream office software is not smooth.
"When dealing with complex projects, relying solely on a dialogue box to carry the thought process is far from sufficient," said Cove co-founder Andy. "Just as we wouldn't use WeChat to write reports or text messages for project planning, collaboration with AI also requires more suitable tools."
Visual Workspace: A New Attempt Combining Notion with AI
At its core, Cove features a visual workspace similar to Notion. Users can freely organize text, tables, images, web pages, PDFs, and other content types on the canvas, with AI acting as a collaborator directly involved in content creation and optimization. This design allows users to work in a way that is closer to natural thinking, avoiding the issues of ideas being easily forgotten or difficult to organize in traditional AI chat tools.
Its Chrome extension enables Cove to seamlessly integrate with common office tools like Gmail, Google Docs, and Salesforce. Users can ask questions while browsing web pages, compare information from multiple pages, or directly save content to their workspace.
More impressively, Cove also features a powerful Chrome extension, allowing users to seamlessly integrate the AI assistant into their existing workflows. Whether dealing with emails, documents, or CRM systems, Cove can intelligently provide assistance.
From Google Maps to AI Innovation
Cove's three co-founders, Andy, Mike, and Stephen, all hail from the early team of Google Maps. Stephen and Andy later participated in founding Uber Eats and developed it into a global business, while Mike held a key position at Stripe Identity, accumulating extensive experience in AI and machine learning.
Currently, early users have applied Cove in various scenarios, including business plan writing, sales research, project management, and more. An entrepreneur noted, "Cove allows me to organize market research and planning for my startup in a more systematic way, and the real-time assistance from AI makes the entire process more efficient."
The Future of AI Collaboration Tools
As businesses increasingly demand AI for office work, the market for AI collaboration tools is rapidly expanding. Compared to Notion's existing AI features or purely conversational assistants like Claude and ChatGPT, Cove is attempting to redefine AI-assisted work through the innovation of a visual workspace.
The product is now officially available to all users. For those looking to better utilize AI in team collaboration, Cove offers a new and noteworthy option. However, as a new product, the construction of its ecosystem and the refinement of its features will take time. In the rapidly evolving market of AI tools, whether Cove can truly realize its product vision remains to be seen.