Context, the startup building an AI-powered office suite announced Wednesday it had raised $11 million in a seed round led by Lux Capital, which includes participation from Qualcomm ventures and general catalysts. The round raises the company's total to around $15.75 million, with a value context of $70 million.
Thiel Fellow founder Joseph Semli began working on the context in 2024 after realising that the current digital office suite was not suitable for utilizing the AI model.
“[W]Maintaining the power of e has a variety of applications that are not necessarily built [AI models] Semrai told TechCrunch in a phone interview. [models] Understand large context windows and get the best results using multiple applications at the same time. ”
Over the past few years, many startups in their productivity and viewing space have adopted chatforward experiences, primarily embracing changes in their user interfaces, thanks to the rise of AI-powered chatbots like ChatGpt. Semrai believes that a similarly chat-focused context will become a powerful tool for workers using office suites, just like how Cursor has become a useful application for programmers.
Joseph Semrai, Founder of Context Image Credit: Context
Office suite makers such as Google and Microsoft have injected AI into their applications. Historically in a creative space, Canva designs products tailored to all types of office work with the center's AI. Meanwhile, the concept is to build an enterprise workplace in AI search and research modes.
Many of these products offer connectors for third-party applications. However, Semrai said that while connections to sources and data acquisition are commoditized, the new age tool does not always provide useful features for analysis. That's where context comes in, he said. It is designed to make it easier for users to infer data that they retrieve from a variety of sources and make decisions based on them.
The context has a simple interface with a chat box in the center. You can ask AI tools to perform research derived from documentation, integration, and web knowledge. You can then ask them to convert all of this into a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, but continue to interact with it to generate different artifacts.
The context also provides a Python interpreter to allow code to be executed.
According to Semrai, the goal doesn't necessarily replace fully-dieted office suites like Microsoft 365. Unlike many AI-powered data analytics products, for example, the context can work offline immediately, allowing for simple analysis and document drafting based on existing data and documents via the context's desktop client.
Users can try out the context for free with 50 credits, one workspace and 10 team members. Alternatively, you can pay $20 a month to earn 2,000 credits to your workspace or team members without any restrictions.