Tagged: productivity
30 results
Height
Height was a New York-based software company that built an AI-native project management and collaboration tool for product teams. Founded in 2018 by ex-Stripe designer-engineer Michael Villar, Height combined tasks, chat, and adaptive workflows in one keyboard-first app, then pivoted to an 'autonomous' model in which an AI agent called Copilot handled the routine legwork of building software - triaging bugs, updating specs, pruning backlogs, and drafting standups. Backed by roughly $18.3M in venture funding, Height competed with Linear, Asana, and Jira before winding the product down in 2025.
Lark
Lark is ByteDance's productivity superapp that stitches chat, video meetings, docs, spreadsheets, calendar, and project workflows into one platform, designed for multilingual teams that want to shrink their tool stack without losing power.
Switchboard
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform built for remote and hybrid teams. Instead of screen-sharing and tab-juggling, it put video and live, editable web apps - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello and more - side by side in persistent virtual rooms, so a team could return to a project exactly where it left off. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, the company raised roughly $38 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Icon Ventures, Spark Capital and HubSpot Ventures, and held five patents. In late 2024 Ashkenazi wound down Switchboard and pivoted the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform.
Thrive Global
Thrive Global is a behavior change technology company founded by Arianna Huffington in 2016 to help end the stress and burnout epidemic. It embeds science-backed 'Microsteps' - tiny, sustainable habit changes - directly into the daily workflow of employees at more than 200 organizations across 160+ countries, pairing behavioral science with AI to improve health outcomes and productivity for frontline workers and executives alike.
Microsoft
Microsoft is a global technology company founded in 1975 that builds software, cloud services, devices and gaming platforms used by billions of people and organizations. Best known for Windows and the Office/Microsoft 365 productivity suite, it now anchors its future on the Azure cloud and Copilot AI, positioning itself as core infrastructure for enterprise computing and the generative-AI era.
Magic
Magic is a San Francisco-founded, remote-first company that matches businesses and busy professionals with dedicated remote assistants backed by an AI layer. Founded in 2015 out of Y Combinator by the team behind Made in Space, it launched as a viral SMS 'text us for anything' concierge service and has since evolved into a platform for full-time and part-time executive, admin, customer-support and bookkeeping assistants, plus an always-on 'Magic 24/7' human-plus-AI service. Every assistant is equipped with Magic AI, an in-browser tool wired to premium models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Magical
Magical is a San Francisco software company building AI agents and browser-based automation that move data between apps and websites without formal integrations. It started life as a free Chrome extension for text expansion and form autofill used by roughly a million people at companies like Amazon, Airbnb and Netflix, then pivoted toward agentic AI that runs multi-step operational work - increasingly focused on healthcare revenue-cycle and patient-access tasks. Founded in 2020 during the COVID lockdown by the husband-and-wife team of Harpaul Sambhi and Rosie Chopra, the company has raised roughly $41 million, led by a $35M Series A from Coatue.
Obvious
Obvious is a San Francisco AI company, formerly known as Flatfile, that builds an AI agent workspace under the tagline "Less Chat. More Work." Instead of returning chat answers, the Obvious agent collaborates with users to produce finished artifacts - docs, slides, sheets, dashboards, apps, timelines and code - while transforming data, running deep research and building on-demand integrations. Founded in 2019 by David Boskovic and Eric Crane, the company built its reputation on Flatfile, a widely used data-onboarding product, then rebranded to Obvious in 2025 to launch a broader agentic platform. It has raised roughly $87M-$95M across Seed, Series A and a $50M Series B led by Tiger Global.
Superhuman
Superhuman is a workplace AI company built from three well-known productivity brands. It began in 2014 as a fast, keyboard-driven email client founded by Rahul Vohra. In 2025 the app was acquired by Grammarly, and that October the combined company - which also owns the writing assistant Grammarly and the workspace tool Coda - renamed itself Superhuman and launched an AI assistant called Superhuman Go. The company, led by CEO Shishir Mehrotra, now positions Superhuman as a suite of AI agents that work across email, documents and writing to amplify how people get work done.
Michael Villar
Michael Villar is the founder and CEO of Height, a New York-based project management platform that is trying to hand the tedious parts of running projects over to an AI reasoning engine. He is Belgian, was selling forum skins at 14, sold his previous startup Kickoff to Stripe in 2013, spent years designing and coding early Stripe products, and now runs Height as a lean team with a Series A behind it.
Ideaflow
Ideaflow is a Palo Alto-based AI company building an 'intelligence amplification' layer for knowledge work. Its flagship product is a notebook that augments your thinking as you type, letting people capture and stitch together fragments of information. The company has since expanded into team knowledge tools - Base, which surfaces context from Slack, meetings, and documents, and meeting intelligence - aiming to become an organization's collective memory. Founded around 2015 by MIT Media Lab designer Jacob Cole and Etherpad/Meteor veteran David Greenspan, it has raised roughly $11M in seed funding from First Round Capital, 8VC, StartX, Naval Ravikant, and Tim Draper.
MiChamba
MiChamba is a Mexico-founded startup that turns WhatsApp into an operational management platform for frontline and deskless teams across Latin America and the US Hispanic market. Instead of forcing workers onto a new app, it layers AI agents - led by an assistant named MarIA - on top of the messaging tool people already use, converting informal chats into trackable tasks, reports, and productivity data. It raised a $2.25M pre-seed round in 2025 and counts Hilton, Pemex, and Repsol among 50+ customers in construction, hospitality, logistics, and industrial sectors.
Moonlight
Moonlight is a San Francisco seed-stage startup founded in 2023 by Stanford MBA and former Activision product manager Siran Jiang. It began as Moonlight Focus, a science-backed productivity and biohacking app built around ultradian rhythms, live focus tracking and flow-state interventions, and has since evolved toward Moonlight AI - a personalized learning platform that turns any topic into gamified, AI-generated quests for children. Across both incarnations, the through-line is the same: use behavioral science and playful mechanics to help people direct their attention on purpose.
Optiverse
Optiverse is a Swiss AI meeting platform that turns everyday conversations into structured, actionable work. Its assistant, OptiAgent, transcribes meetings, writes custom summaries, extracts action items, pushes updates into CRMs, and makes past calls searchable across a company. Founded in Zurich in 2024 by researchers from ETH Zurich, EPFL, MIT and HSG, the company positions itself as the 'digital brain of the enterprise' and reports supporting over 1,000 companies while emphasizing Swiss-hosted, privacy-first data handling.
Plus AI
Plus AI is a Seattle-based software company that builds an AI presentation maker working directly inside Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint. Rather than trapping users in a separate web editor, Plus generates and edits native slides - drafting decks from a prompt, converting documents like PDFs and Word files into presentations, rewriting and remixing existing slides, and matching custom brand templates. Founded in 2021 by former Madrona venture capitalist Daniel Li and ex-BCG and Webflow product leader Chloe Qi, the company has raised roughly $8-10M in seed funding and says its tools have been installed by more than a million users.
Productive.ai
Productive.ai (legally Phoneic, Inc.) is a San Mateo, California startup that turns ordinary cell phone calls into finished work. Its AI Call Assistant records and transcribes business calls, then automatically generates summaries, notes, tasks and calendar events and logs everything into the user's CRM - so that when the call ends, the paperwork is already done. Founded by messaging-and-voice veteran Enlai Chu, the company targets real estate agents, salespeople, recruiters, mortgage and medical professionals, and won the National Association of REALTORS 2023 Pitch Battle.
Roger
Roger (legally Iris Technologies) is a Salt Lake City-based construction-tech startup building an AI-powered collaboration workspace for construction project managers. By syncing with email tools like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail and layering on task boards, material trackers, and submittal logs, Roger turns the chaos of coordinating 50+ stakeholders into structured, trackable work. Its AI drafts follow-up emails, chases vendors on long-lead items, updates logs, and keeps details from slipping through the cracks - aiming to make every project run like a team's best project.
Willow
Willow is a San Francisco startup building voice-first interfaces that turn natural speech into polished text across every app on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Founded in 2024 by Stanford dropouts Allan Guo and Lawrence Liu and backed by Y Combinator, Willow promises roughly 3x the accuracy of built-in dictation with ~200ms response time, automatic filler-word removal, style-matching, and an AI mode that reshapes rough spoken notes into finished messages. The company raised $4.2M in seed funding and has grown roughly 50% month over month, with early enterprise users including Uber, Heidi Health, and Zego.
Kais Khimji
Kais Khimji is the co-founder and CEO of Blockit AI, an autonomous calendar-scheduling agent that negotiates meeting times over email and Slack. A former six-year partner at Sequoia Capital and Harvard alum, he revived a student-era idea about why calendars don't talk to each other, raised a $5M seed led by Pat Grady at Sequoia, and now serves more than 200 companies including Brex, Together.ai, Rogo, a16z, Accel, and Index.
Lawrence Coburn
Lawrence Coburn is the co-founder and CEO of Ambient, an AI chief of staff for founders, CEOs and leadership teams. A four-time founder, he previously built DoubleDutch (the leading mobile event app, acquired by Cvent in 2019), twine (employee connection software for remote teams) and RateItAll (one of the early consumer review sites). Based in San Francisco's Mission District, he combines a generalist's appetite for new platforms with two decades of operating scars.
Fundamental Research Labs
Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera) is a San Francisco applied AI research company building autonomous, socially intelligent agents - what it calls 'digital human beings.' Founded by former MIT computational neuroscientist Dr. Robert Yang, the company ships consumer and prosumer products including Shortcut (a superhuman Excel agent) and Fairies (a general-purpose AI assistant), and raised a $33M Series A in August 2025 led by Prosus Ventures.
NinjaTech AI
NinjaTech AI is a Palo Alto-based generative AI company building autonomous AI agents that complete real, multi-step work. Its consumer product, Ninja (myninja.ai), packages 24+ frontier models into one workspace; its flagship SuperNinja agent plans, codes, researches, and executes entire workflows inside a dedicated virtual machine. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google and ex-AWS leaders, the company runs on AWS Trainium and Cerebras silicon.
Please
Please (formerly MultiOn) is a Palo Alto consumer AI company building a thinking reminders and planning app that captures ideas, connects the dots between them, and nudges users at the right moment so they never miss a thing.
Town
Town is a San Francisco AI startup building a personal AI assistant - your 'Townie' - that plugs into the tools you already use (email, calendar, Slack, docs, WhatsApp, desktop and web), learns how you work, and proactively does the work for you. Founded in late 2024 by former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze and ex-Google applied-AI director Tony Vincent, Town launched in 2025 as an AI-driven tax-and-compliance service for small businesses, then widened into a general-purpose assistant. It exited beta in June 2026 alongside a $55M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Elio Assaf
Elio Assaf is the Lebanese co-founder and CEO of Optiverse AG, a Zurich-based AI startup building a meeting assistant that turns everyday conversations into structured, operational intelligence - automating notes, summaries, transcriptions and CRM updates. A computer-vision and machine-learning researcher who worked across ETH Zurich, MIT and EPFL and previously engineered AI at Thales, he incorporated Optiverse in June 2024, won a CHF 150,000 Venture Kick award, and grew the platform to serve over 1,000 businesses worldwide while users report saving an average of 6.8 hours a week.
Ricky Yean
Ricky Yean is the co-founder and CEO of Flow Club, a virtual coworking and body-doubling community where remote, independent, and neurodiverse workers join live focus sessions to get things done together. A Taiwanese immigrant who arrived in the US at eleven and attended Stanford on a full endowment scholarship, he is a three-time startup founder and two-time Y Combinator alum (S10, S21). Before Flow Club he built Crowdbooster, one of the most popular early Twitter and Facebook analytics tools used by brands from Nike to the United Nations, and Upbeat, a tech-enabled PR service. He writes a weekly newsletter on startups, Asian America, and life, and does standup comedy on the side.
Notion
Notion is an all-in-one connected workspace that blends notes, docs, wikis, databases, projects, calendar, and email into a single, modular tool - 'LEGO for software.' Founded in San Francisco in 2013 by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, it nearly collapsed before its 2016 rebirth and has since grown to more than 100 million users, $600M+ in annual recurring revenue, and an $11 billion valuation, increasingly positioning itself as an AI workspace with built-in agents.
Fireflies.ai
Fireflies.ai is a San Francisco-based AI meeting assistant that joins video and phone calls across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams to record, transcribe, summarize and analyze conversations. Its bot captures speaker-labeled notes and action items, its AskFred assistant answers questions about past meetings, and its Perplexity-powered Live Assist offers real-time web answers during calls. Founded in 2016 by Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong, the company reached a $1 billion valuation in 2025 while staying profitable and is used by teams across more than a million organizations.
Duckbill
Duckbill is a Boston-based service that combines AI with trained human assistants - called copilots - to take the dreaded everyday tasks and endless life admin off your plate. Members hand off to-dos like disputing a bill, booking appointments, researching long-term care, or planning a party via text, email, app, voice memo, or chat, and a copilot, supported by AI, researches and executes them. Founded in 2022 by Meghan Joyce and Emi Gonzalez, the company raised a $24.75M Series A in 2023 led by Forerunner Ventures.
HERE
HERE is the enterprise browser company formerly known as OpenFin. Built on Google Chromium, its software turns the workday browser into a unified workspace - stitching web apps, internal tools and data together so employees stop paying the 'toggle tax' of jumping between disconnected applications. After 14 years winning over the world's largest banks with its desktop interoperability platform, OpenFin relaunched as HERE in June 2024 to take the same technology beyond finance into contact centers, healthcare, government and any enterprise drowning in browser tabs.