Context, a startup building an AI-powered office suite, on Wednesday announced that it raised $11 million in a seed round led by Lux Capital with participation from Qualcomm Ventures and General Catalyst. The round, which brings the company’s total raised to around $15.75 million, values Context at $70 million.
Founder Joseph Semrai, a Thiel Fellow, started working on Context in 2024 after he realized that current digital office suites are not well suited to take advantage of AI models.
“[W]e have a bunch of disparate applications that aren’t necessarily built keeping the power of [AI models] in mind,” Semrai told TechCrunch in a phone interview. “We 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.”
Over the past few years, many startups in the productivity and browsing space have made user interface changes to adopt a chat-forward experience, largely thanks to the rise of AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT. Semrai thinks that Context, which is similarly chat-focused, can be a powerful tool for workers using an office suite, similar to how Cursor has become a useful application for programmers.
Office suite makers like Google and Microsoft have infused AI into their applications. Canva, which has been in the creative space historically, is also designing products that suit all kinds of office work with AI at the center. Notion, meanwhile, is building an enterprise workplace with an AI search and research mode.
Many of these products offer connectors to third-party applications. But Semrai said that while connecting to sources and retrieving data is becoming commoditized, new-age tools don’t always deliver capabilities that help with analysis. That, he said, is where Context comes in — it’s designed to make it easier for users to reason over the data they fetch from various sources and make decisions based on that.
Context has a simple interface with a chat box in the center. You can ask the AI tool to perform research based on your documents, integrations, and web knowledge. You can then ask it to convert all this to a document, spreadsheet, or presentation, while continuing to interact with it to generate different artifacts.
Context also offers a Python interpreter to let you run code.
The goal isn’t necessarily replacing a fully-featured office suite like Microsoft 365. Rather, Context is going after a market not well-served by the current crop of tools, according to Semrai. For example, unlike many AI-powered data analysis products, Context will soon be able to work offline, Semrai said, enabling simple analysis and document drafting based on existing data and documents via Context’s desktop app.
Users can try out Context for free with 50 credits, one workspace, and 10 team members. Alternatively, they can pay $20 per month to get 2,000 credits with no limits on workspaces and team members.
