Joseph Semrai, founder of Context and one of the most recent Thiel Fellows, has raised $11 million in seed financing. He plans to use this investment to build an AI-powered office assistant. The oversubscribed round was led by Lux Capital with participation from Qualcomm Ventures and General Catalyst. Semrai, who is currently based in India, brought his work on Context to fruition in 2024. He saw there was a huge opportunity in the way today’s digital office suites incorporated artificial intelligence.
Semrai has sharpened her skills working for publications such as the Huffington Post and The Next Web. It’s this background that has informed his approach to building Context. He realized that most current productivity applications are poorly designed to take advantage of what extremely large AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT can actually do. “We have a bunch of disparate applications that aren’t necessarily built keeping the power of [AI models] in mind,” Semrai stated.
Context’s goal is to develop a chat-first office suite that’s purposefully built to foster workflow and productivity. It offers users a free plan along with a paid subscription model priced at $20 per month for 2,000 credits. Their paid plan lets you have as many workspaces and team members as you want, making Context a great tool for different kinds of organizations.
The digital productivity landscape is changing so quickly. Numerous new startups are pioneering user interface innovations in order to create a more chat-first environment. Semrai envisions Context as an essential tool for workers to help them find their way through this transformational change. He emphasized the importance of utilizing AI models effectively: “[W]e want to take advantage of the fact that [models] can understand large context windows and use multiple applications at the same time to get the best result.”
Semrai wants to upend Context by addressing the flaws of existing tools. They will provide wizard-like analytical capacity that is often lacking in today’s office productivity environments. His vision for Context is very much in line with a broader trend towards embedding AI directly into people’s workflows, increasing both productivity and teamwork along the way.
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