New York, NY - August 2025 - Founded by David Petrou, Continua AI has raised $8 million in seed funding to revolutionize group conversations with a conversationally intelligent assistant. The round was led by GV (Google Ventures) and supported by Bessemer Venture Partners, along with a group of prominent angel investors including Jeff Dean, Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, and others - affirming confidence in a new paradigm for messaging platforms.

Why Your Group Chats Are Exploding - and What to Do About It

Group messaging (on SMS, iMessage, Discord, and more) is ubiquitous, but so is the chaos: unanswered questions, forgotten decisions, lost file links, and endless scrollbacks. David Petrou, a former Google distinguished engineer involved in projects like Google Goggles and Glass, saw this opportunity firsthand and decided to address it differently. Instead of building a new chat app, he created Continua, a “Social AI” that joins existing conversations, helping groups stay organized, productive, and, most importantly, sane.

Continua can summarize threads, set reminders, schedule polls, generate documents, and surface calendar invites - all in real-time, without tearing people away from the chat. It understands when to be helpful and when to stay quiet.

The Investors’ Bet - and the Bigger Play for Founders

Investors see Continua as more than a chatbot - they see a new interaction layer for digital communication. Behind the funding, GV partner Erik Nordlander said they backed Petrou before the full vision even solidified. For founders riding emerging waves, here’s the real insight buried in this story:

Continua didn’t chase the “assistant” hype. It inserted itself inside one of the most used, least structured spaces in digital life: group chat. By building something that enhances a sticky platform rather than competing with it, Continua positioned itself as infrastructure, not just another app. And when your product can slot seamlessly into what people already use - improving behavior without demanding change - you've created gravity rather than friction.

That concept - building for the user’s existing behavior instead of forcing new ones - is how long-term adoption is really won. Most founders build ‘better widgets.’ Continua built a silent teammate.

How the Tech Works - Smart, Social, Subtle

Continua uses behavioral ML and context inference to decide when to step in - not to respond to every message but to help when needed. It interprets tone, timing, and group dynamics so it knows how to summarize or when to offer suggestions like:

• “Need a reminder about this team sync?”
  
• “Here’s the poll you asked for”
  
• “Added a shared document with bullet points”
  
• “Suggesting a calendar invite for everyone tomorrow”
  

Continua can also field direct questions via DM - “when’s that movie again?” - or proactively send one to the group. That's social intelligence in action, and it’s built on subtle model tuning that avoids turning the agent into an annoying chatterbox.

Scaling the Vision: Roadmap and Strategy

With the new funding in place, Continua plans to:

• Expand platform support (including WhatsApp, Slack, Teams)
  
• Enhance summarization and situational awareness capabilities
  
• Launch integrations with calendar and doc tools like Google, Outlook, Notion
  
• Grow their engineering team across NLP, UX, and mobile dev
  

The company’s first goals are to expand availability to early-access users and refine social tuning. Early metrics show strong retention in group threads and positive feedback on “keeping everyone on the same page.”

What’s Next in Social AI - and Why It Matters

As AI becomes integrated into daily life, the winners won’t just be chatbots - they’ll be the implicit assistants in the spaces people already live in. Continua stands at the edge of that shift, building intelligence not as a standalone product but as woven into conversational context and shared narrative.

This is more than technology - it's reshaping how groups coordinate, remember, and create together.