This ex-Google engineer’s $8M bet on social AI

^{A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.}

Hello. Happy 2026, friends. I’m glad you’re here. 

We’re kicking off the new year with an epic story of a veteran Google engineer turned entrepreneur. His story showcases how even a long-standing career at one of the world’s biggest companies can’t satiate that spirit of innovation. 

And there’s never been a better time for builders. 

This week’s issue isn’t like every other AI founder story. He’s creating a new category, focused on a user base that’s not the tech bro. 

Enjoy this read. 

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Founded: April 2023 

Team size: 8

Funding to date: $8 million raised in a seed round led by GV and Bessemer

ARR: Not publicly disclosed 

Growth metric: “Over 45,000 users have tried the product, and we have a 68% D30 retention (Day 30 retention), which is a really high number.”

David Petrou is an 18-year Google veteran who reached Distinguished Software Engineer status. He worked on Google Search, was the founding engineer for Google Goggles (which pre-dated Google Lens), and was on the launch team for Google Glass. 

In the last 10 years before he left Google, Petrou was in machine intelligence, research, and personal AI projects. He was managing a team of 150 people all over the world. 

When Petrou joined Google in 2005, it was like “Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.” But the spirit of innovation was in his blood, and his entrepreneurial dad taught him how ideas are the most important thing. 2023 seemed like the perfect time to jump ship, given what was happening with AI. 

“My whole career at Google was one of serial entrepreneurship, where I would come up with an idea, prototype it, evangelize it, get a team together, productionize it, and launch and repeat. However, it was always within the context of a company with unlimited resources, and I wanted to see how fast I could run on my own,” Petrou said. 

Petrou was watching how the progress with LLMs was leading to an innate sense of social intelligence or machine etiquette. He knew from experience that searches that originate inside your head outnumber those that originate from your external environment. “Think about the phone screen not as an output device but as an input into an AI,” he explained. 

With much of AI today being a single player mode, Petrou was by this concept of social AI.

Continua is an AI agent that meets users where they are, in group chat. A quiet and helpful member of the group. 

People are using Continua to help manage recipes, plan trips together, plan the pickup schedule for kids, recall the winter concert dates, follow sports scores, look into stocks, set reminders, recommend products etc. 

“It can recall facts from the past. You might be talking about something like going to a movie theater, then later you could just DM Continua to ask which theater that was. The mental model is kind of like a person in the group chat, that offers continuous help on all sorts of things,” Petrou shared. 

Continua passed a CASA security audit, which means the product is following best practices for data security. 

Petrou used the MVP product approach to test out a specific concept. He looked into the total addressable market, the landscape, different risk factors, platforms, and all sorts of things that could kill an idea. 

“I decided that we’re not going to have a long gestation period. Continua is a phone number, not even an app, so there’s a viral nature to it. If you have a good experience with it, you might invite a new friend. 99% of our users come through that organic acquisition.” 

The ideal users are people who are texters and comfortable with AI – making it a very broad category. Continua’s ads (on Instagram) tend to perform better with women, which is likely due to the social aspect. 

“In a crowded AI market, we aren't fighting for the same expensive 'tech bro' audience as everyone else. We have found a massive niche with women who are converting faster and cheaper because they immediately understand the utility of the tool.”

“The data backs this up: Our female audience is 31% more cost-effective to acquire than our male audience. We’ve built a playbook where for every $1 spent, we acquire over 2 high-intent female users, driving our recent acquisition costs as low as $0.29. We aren't selling specs; we are selling a solution to the chaos.”

Petrou shared how, as a B2C company, the focus is on growing their number of users – with monetization a secondary goal. 

They’re toying with various options such as: 

“Continua feels somewhat magical to use, so our strategy on TikTok and Instagram is to show, don’t tell. We focus entirely on User Generated Content (UGC) that highlights the wild and creative ways people integrate Continua into their social circles.” 

“Whether it’s parents summarizing emails from multiple schools, friends syncing calendars for a weekend in Cabo, or a group shopping for White Elephant gifts, we are showing users how to handle life's logistics without ever leaving the group chat.” 

Over 45,000 users have tried the product, and they have a 68% D30 retention (Day 30 retention), which is above industry average. 

“We don’t measure success by hours spent in a chat window; we measure it by the number of Friendsgivings, carpool pickups, and drinks with friends that actually happen. Our goal is for AI to fade into the background – not to be the topic of conversation, but to be the helping hand in the messy, beautiful, chaotic web we call life.” 

Petrou makes it clear that Continua is like a helpful assistant, as opposed to a friend or companion. “We’ve all seen some pretty horrific examples where people think that AI is their friend. We explicitly promote against that and stop answering when users go in that direction.”

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Speak soon,
Amanda

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