Trends Podcast

A month after ChatGPT helped a group of friends plan a trip, they asked it which hotel they booked and who owes for it.

It had no record of the trip.

Ken Chong raised eight point three million dollars to fix that.

His startup is called Jarvie. In June, Andreessen Horowitz, Base Ten and Lightspeed backed it.

Since last November, ChatGPT can sit in a group chat with up to twenty friends. It decides for itself when to speak, so it might pitch hotels before anyone asks. One of the friends books the hotel for everyone.

When the group starts a new chat to plan the next trip, the AI starts from zero. OpenAI turned its memory off in group chats, so everyone scrolls back through the old thread by hand.

So what the hell is Jarvie?

Jarvie is an AI assistant a group adds to its iMessage thread, so everyone in the chat shares one assistant. Chong says it coordinates dinners, organizes trips, summarizes the conversation and looks things up.

He says Jarvie "has long-term memory" and "understands your social relationships." His pitch is that AI is better with friends.

Picture the same friends planning their second trip, in two different chats.

In the chat with ChatGPT, someone has to retell the first trip from the beginning: where they stayed, what it cost and who still owes money.

In the chat with Jarvie, the pitch is that the AI starts from what the group already planned: the hotel they picked last time and who paid for it.

That difference is what Jarvie's investors are paying for.

Beta testers have added Jarvie to their chats with family, friends, partners, roommates and coworkers.

OpenAI switched on group chats worldwide last November.

Seven months later, Jarvie's investors bet that a group would rather have an AI that remembers what it planned last time.

Lightspeed, one of those investors, had already backed Shapes, another group chat AI. In April, it led Shapes' eight million dollar seed round.

That same month, two college students raised five point one million dollars for Series, an AI social network inside iMessage.

In a Shapes chat, AI members do research, bring back options and start tasks without anyone tagging them.

Shapes says more than four hundred thousand people use it each month, in group chats with their friends.

Continua built group chat AI too, with eight million dollars from G V, Google's venture fund. About a year later, it dropped group chat AI. Now it sells a tool for developers who use coding agents.

Investors are backing group chat AI, while Continua already walked away from it. Jarvie's bet is that memory is what makes a group keep it.

Jarvie and Shapes are built for any group, from friends to family to partners. A tool for any group has to learn what each group cares about.

If you're building one of these, start narrower, with one kind of group that plans the same thing each week, like the parents on a youth sports team.

Their group chat fills up with the same questions each week: when's the game, who's driving and who owes what.

When the game moves, somebody scrolls back through last week's messages to find out who offered to drive.

By then, three parents have asked the same question in the chat. One parent answers all three.

That parent does this each week of the season.

An agent built for team parents would know from day one to track the schedule, the carpool and the money. One parent adds it to the chat. Through the week it notes the game times and who offered to drive. When the game moves, it tells the parents who are driving.

On game day, a parent asks who's driving and gets a name back. Nobody has to scroll through last week's messages.

The parent who used to answer every question gets the week back. That parent is the one who tells the next team about it.

Then the builder adds it to the next team's chat in the same league.

Others are already in these chats too. On October fifth, a startup called Instinct added its AI agent to group chats for carpools and trip plans, the same jobs the team parents need done. You can still win by serving one group better than a general assistant does.

Pick one kind of group that plans the same thing each week.

Write down the three questions that group asks over and over. For team parents, that's when's the game, who's driving and who owes what.

Build the agent to answer those three, then add it to one group's chat and watch what they ask next.

Jarvie raised eight point three million dollars to build a group chat AI that remembers. Visit trends dot V C and join more than fifty thousand founders to get the next opportunity.