Much has been said about the construction context for AI systems. In consumer software, we’ve seen new companies built around look for, documentsand meetings. They all want to capture the context of your digital life, provide connections to other tools, and let you query all that data. Some tools went further. For example, Rewind (which became Unlimited and sold to goal) and Microsoft Recall aim to capture everything that happens on your screen and help you remember it all.
A new startup called birdie is trying something similar with a slightly different approach. While apps like Rewind store screenshots or some type of visual data, Littlebird “reads” the screen and stores the context in text format.
The core idea behind the product is that since you read the screen all the time, there is no need to provide additional context for productivity. The startup believes that while many AI tools try to distract you, Littlebird can work in the background and can only appear when you want 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 said it automatically ignores password managers and sensitive fields on web forms, such as passwords and credit card details. You can also choose to connect other apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Reminders with the app.
The app lets you ask questions about your data and gives you pre-generated messages to get you started, such as “What have I been doing today?” or “What types of emails are important to me?” Within a couple of days of use, I noticed that these prompts became more personalized as time went on.
Littlebird also has a built-in Granola-like annotator that uses system audio and runs in the background to capture the transcript of meetings and create notes and action items based on that. When you open a meeting in detailed view, there is an option called “Meeting Preparation” that takes into account the context of past meetings, emails, and company history to give you more details about the meeting. 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 offers detailed prompts for Littlebird to run on a repeating interval, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. The company lists some ready-to-use routines, such as daily information, weekly activity summary, and yesterday’s work summary. Users can also create their own routines with personalized instructions.
Littlebird was founded by Alap Shah, Naman Shah and Alexander Green in 2024. Brothers Alap and Naman founded Sentieo, a platform for institutional investors, which was sold to market intelligence company AlphaSense. They also previously co-founded a health food company called Thistle. Alap also co-authored Citrini’s viral article on how AI agents could destroy the economy, which resulted in several technology stocks falling. Green has created several hardware, software and artificial intelligence companies.
“We started when Alap posed an interesting problem: AI will focus on your (users’) data. The models don’t know anything about you, and that limits their usefulness. We were thinking about various UI and OS paradigms that would likely be ripe for disruption with AI, and that started Littlebird as a project,” Green told TechCrunch during a call.
Green noted that while Rewind was close to what Littlebird is trying to do, it was based on screenshots and didn’t have a great search experience. He said the startup is just getting started and there are many more problems to solve, including making large language models (LLMs) understand different types of context about users.
With Littlebird, users can delete their data at any time and their data is stored in the cloud with encryption. Green said the reason behind storing data in the cloud was to run powerful models for different AI workflows, which is not possible locally.
“We don’t store any visual information. We only store text, which makes the data much lighter. I think that was probably another reason why Recall and Rewind had problems, which is that taking a screenshot requires a lot more information. I also think it’s more invasive,” he said.
Littlebird is free to download and use, but for more usage limits and access to features like imaging, users can pay for plans starting at $20 per month.
The startup has 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.
Several of these investors are regular users of the product. Rajaram, who has worked at Google and Facebook on advertising products, said the product removes the friction of remembering, retrieving and explaining your own work again. DocSend co-founder and CEO Heddleston said he rewrote the company’s marketing site using the tool, using the context of meetings, email, Notion and more.
Rachitsky, who runs his own newsletter and podcast, said AI is only as good as the context it has, and it misses a lot of your day. He said he asks the tool how to improve your productivity workflows and be happier. He said that to be successful in the long term, the product will need to find a great use case.
“I think it’s about finding that must-have use case. That’s all that matters for the success of this product right now. I know a lot of people have already found that for themselves, and the team is leaning on these experiences as they see these use cases emerge,” he said.
“I’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 will use your product until you launch it. The strategy is to release things early, see how people use them, and double down on those use cases rather than waiting for something to be fully figured out.”
