After nearly two decades at Google, David Petrou, the engineer who helped bring Google Goggles and Google Glass to life, left big tech in early 2023 to do something bold: start anew.
“I was seeing how fast technology was changing, and I felt there are certain ideas that are best explored in the context of a startup,” Petrou told TechCrunch.
That idea became Continua, a consumer-facing AI tool designed to make group chats on SMS, iMessage, and Discord less chaotic and a lot more useful.
“The simple way to think about it is that we’re bringing the power of LLMs to group chats,” Petrou said.
On Tuesday, Continua announced it raised an $8 million seed round, led by GV, with support from Bessemer Venture Partners and several angel investors.
The lightbulb moment came when Petrou noticed a common behavior: people would ask ChatGPT or another AI for help, then copy-paste the response back into their group chats.
Why not skip the middleman?
Whether it is planning a trip, deciding on dinner, or picking a movie, Continua’s AI can jump into the conversation only when it’s needed, setting reminders, launching polls, creating Google Docs with checklists, adding calendar invites, and even helping users privately recall forgotten details like meeting times or locations.
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The tricky part? Teaching an LLM to handle multiple humans at once. Most AI assistants are trained for one-on-one chats, so Continua had to “break the LLM’s brain” and rewire it for group social dynamics. That means understanding when to speak up, when to hang back, and how to avoid spamming the chat.
“You want the agent to have social intelligence,” Petrou explained. Users can call on Continua for help or tell it to take a back seat if it’s getting too chatty. Getting started is as easy as adding Continua’s phone number to an SMS group or its username to a Discord channel.
While others like Meta and Hey Umai are experimenting with AI chat agents, Petrou says Continua is built specifically for group interactions. And GV’s Erik Nordlander agrees, so much so that GV invested before the concept had even fully formed.
“David is a brilliant engineer, someone who has been working with AI since before it was the hot thing,” Nordlander said.
Profitability is still in the works, but Nordlander hinted that the AI’s knack for planning trips and booking events could become a revenue stream down the road. The big question now? If AI can navigate the chaos of your friends’ group chat without annoying anyone, what’s stopping it from running your next family reunion, wedding, or even your work Slack channel?
