Cove, a Silicon Valley startup that helps workers collaborate while using AI agents, announced Tuesday that its team is joining Microsoft.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cove will shut down its product on April 1.
“When we started Cove, we set out to reimagine how people collaborate with AI,” Cove co-founder and CEO Stephen Chau wrote on LinkedIn. “As model capabilities have accelerated, our conviction in that mission has only grown stronger. We’re thrilled to continue this work at Microsoft, where we’ll have the opportunity to pursue an even bigger vision.”
Cove raised a $6 million seed round in 2024 led by Sequoia Capital. The company built software to turn single-threaded chats with conversational agents into a visual workspace. It later allowed users to create custom AI apps. The startup has less than 10 employees, according to LinkedIn.
Chau previously was head of product at Uber Eats before launching Cove in 2023 with Mike Chu and Andy Szybalski. All three previously worked together at Google Maps.
Microsoft is aiming to boost adoption of its Copilot assistant, which remains a relatively small fraction of its commercial user base amid big investments in AI infrastructure. Last week the tech giant unveiled Copilot Cowork, a new AI assistant that can run tasks in the background, create documents, and work across Microsoft 365 apps,
Separately, Microsoft on Tuesday announced a reorg within its Copilot group, unifying its consumer and commercial AI efforts under former Snap executive Jacob Andreou while narrowing the role of Microsoft AI leader Mustafa Suleyman to focus on the superintelligence and frontier models.
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