Continua

Bringing AI to group chats

October 27th, 2025

Happy Monday.

As expected, we’re on the Tech Week comedown, but that just means our weekly startup deep dives are back to business as usual.

A special shoutout to our friends at Copy.ai on their acquisition by Fullcast! We highlighted the team a little over four years ago in one of our earliest Unicorner articles, not long after meeting its co-founder, Paul Yacoubian, on a Clubhouse voice chat. Feels like an age ago!

Ethan and Arek 🦄

Continua is an AI for your group chats that acts as a helpful participant. It listens to the conversation, absorbing context and chiming in to help with logistical or tedious tasks. Some examples include scheduling events, reminding the group about something, or helping decide what to watch for movie night. The company’s approach contrasts with the typical LLMs of today that are trained for one-on-one interactions. Furthermore, it stands out as a solution designed to encourage human interaction rather than limit it.

Check it out: continua.ai

Continua has a freemium business model. The free tier has a limit on the number of messages Continua sends per day. Its premium offering includes no limits on messages and supports external integrations to other apps like calendar and email.

  • Raised an $8 million seed round led by GV and Bessemer Venture Partners in April 2023

  • Averaging 68% 30-day retention

  • Has almost entirely grown organically

David Petrou spent 17 years at Google prior to starting Continua in 2023. Petrou was on the founding team of Google Goggles, now called Google Lens, which allows users to conduct reverse image searches. He worked on Google Glass, the company’s 2014 smart glasses. In his later years, he contributed to many AI projects at Google, including products/services trying to bring AI to mobile phones, while managing over 150 people. 

Petrou’s father was an inventor who instilled the entrepreneurial spirit in his son. Even at Google, Petrou found that he worked like a serial entrepreneur, from coming up with ideas, prototyping, evangelizing the work, productionizing it, and launching it. He was merely doing it within the context of a company with near infinite resources. 

In 2023, he took a leap of faith and left Google, wanting to be part of a quickly changing tech environment. He feels his time at Google prepared him well not only with skills and network, but with the full process of going from zero to one. Given he had always been passionate about using technology to facilitate human connection rather than splintering it, he kept coming back to the idea of “social AI” and eventually resolved to build Continua.

Today’s most noteworthy LLMs are focused on a “single player mode” where users and AI interact one on one. When it comes to group settings, applying an LLM is very different, per Petrou. An LLM in a group chat needs to understand the group dynamic and speak up when it has something helpful to offer. Many LLMs are not prepared for this environment, making it a market with lots of opportunity. And while Continua isn’t the first startup to build in this space, it’s much more “blue ocean” than other AI niches.

Petrou and the team are not only passionate about this space but also incredibly strong technically. Since existing LLMs are unfit for group conversations, Continua can’t just simply plug in to existing APIs like one of OpenAI’s GPTs and expect it to be exceptional. Just one of the many challenges to making this work is known as intent classification (or “reading the room”) in a group context, something the team is not just working on but is capable of accomplishing. 

With increasing adoption of AI, many are re-voicing a familiar concern of an overreliance on technology impeding human-to-human interaction. This is a fair criticism of many AI companies, but Continua is in a unique position to benefit from the discourse. Petrou emphasized the extent to which Continua is working to increase human connectivity. This is reflected in the product, which is designed to solve tedious and automation-ready tasks like scheduling, reminding, reducing decision fatigue, and more. By helping groups focus less on errands and tasks, it creates time and opportunities for actual connection.

Another big advantage I see for Continua is that it creates natural viral loops that enable it to effectively market and sell itself. When someone adds Continua to a group chat, everyone else is introduced to it, after which they can add Continua to their other group chats. This organic viral loop can continue indefinitely. In fact, it has already enabled the team to spend very little on paid marketing. Petrou said roughly 99% of its users come from organic growth and that the 30-day retention rate is 68%, which are both very promising metrics. Throw in the fact that users don’t need to download another app to add Continua to a group chat, effectively removing another barrier for user acquisition, and I see Continua continuing to grow and acquire users without spending big on marketing.

Group chats are ubiquitous across every method and platform of communication. For now, Continua is continuing to grow its user base, proving its value proposition, defining its market share, and iterating on its technology and features. If Continua can maintain its momentum and be the leading LLM-to-group chat provider, it can become to groups what ChatGPT is to one on ones.

Matthew Huo