Littlebird raises $11M for its AI-assisted ‘memory’ tool that reads your computer screen

There has been a lot of talk about building a framework for AI systems. In consumer software, we’ve seen implementations built around search, documents, and meetings. They all want to capture the content of your digital life, provide connectivity to other tools, and let you query all that data. Some tools go further. For example, Rewind (which became Limitless and sold on Meta) and Microsoft Recall aim to capture everything that happens on your screen and help you remember it all.

A new startup called Littlebird is trying the same thing in a slightly different way. While applications like reverse store screenshots or some kind of visual data, Littlebird “reads” the screen and saves the context in text format.

The main idea of ​​the product is that since you are reading your screen all the time, you don’t need to provide more context to be productive. The startup believes that while many AI tools try to distract you, Littlebird can work in the background and 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 automatically ignores password managers and sensitive fields on web forms like passwords and credit card information. You can choose to connect other apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Reminders with the app, too.

The app lets you ask questions about your data, giving you newly created prompts to get you started, like “What was I doing today?” or “What kind of emails are important to me?” After a few days of use, I noticed that these alerts become more personal as time goes on.

Littlebird also has a built-in note-taker similar to Granola that uses system audio and works in the background to capture transcripts from meetings and create notes and action items based on that. When you open a meeting in the detailed view, there is an option called “Configure meeting” that takes into account the context of previous meetings, emails, and company history to give you more information about the meeting. The feature also pulls information from sources like Reddit to let you know what users think about a particular product or company.

Another tool called Cycles provides detailed information for Littlebird to run at a recurring time, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. The company lists ready-to-use processes such as daily information, weekly activity summary, and yesterday’s activity summary. Users can create their own routes and custom commands.

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 the intelligence market AlphaSense. They also previously founded a health food company called Thistle. Alap was also the author of Citrini’s viral paper on how AI agents could destroy the economy, leading to various tech stocks sinking. Green has built various companies in hardware, software, and AI.

“We started when Alap posed the interesting problem that AI will be about you [users’] data. Models know nothing about you, and that limits their use. We were thinking about various UI and OS paradigms that might be ready to be disrupted by AI and started Littlebird as a project,” Green told TechCrunch on the phone.

Green noted that while Rewind was close to what Littlebird was trying to do, it relied on screenshots and didn’t have the best search experience. He said the startup is just getting started and there are many other issues to be resolved, including making large-scale linguistic models (LLM) 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 for storing data in the cloud was to use models that have the ability to perform different AI functions, which are not possible on-premises.

“We don’t store any visual information. We store only the text, which makes the data very little weight. I think that’s maybe another reason why Recall and Rewind is difficult, that is taking a screenshot is very data hungry. And I think it’s very invasive,” he said.

Littlebird is free to download and use, but for more usage restrictions and access to features such as photo editing, 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 ad products, said the product removes the friction of remembering, retrieving, and redefining your work. DocSend 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’s in, and it remembers a lot of your day. He said he was asking the tool about improving his productivity and making him happier. He said for long-term success, the brand will need to find a killer use case.

“I think it’s all about finding that killer must be guilty of using it. That’s the only thing that matters to the success of this product right now. I know that many people have already found that out themselves, and the team relies on this experience as they see these use cases emerge,” he commented.

“I’ve had a lot of AI product developers on the podcast, and the consistent theme is that you really don’t know how people are going to use your product until you release it. The trick is to get the first things out, see how people use them, and double down on those use cases versus waiting for something completely premeditated.”