Poppy launched today as a proactive AI assistant that ingests a user's calendar, email, messages, and location to suggest what to do next, backed by $1.25 million in pre-seed funding led by Kindred Ventures. The San Francisco company, built by a team of 4 under the corporate name Second Nature Computing, is pitching ambient computing — software that watches the signals coming in and surfaces the relevant ones without being asked. DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick joined the round as an angel.
The founder is Sai Kambampati, previously a software engineer at the AI hardware startup Humane. He holds a Master's degree in computer science with a focus on human-computer interaction, and frames Poppy as a bet that today's models are finally good enough to make anticipatory assistants useful instead of annoying.
The product works by connecting to a user's accounts and building a live picture of their day. At launch, Poppy reads Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Gmail, Outlook, iCloud Mail, Apple Health, Reminders, Contacts, iMessage, and WhatsApp. It also hooks into Uber and Instacart, with more integrations planned.
Key facts
- 01Poppy launched May 13, 2026 as a proactive AI assistant from Second Nature Computing.
- 02The San Francisco team of 4 raised $1.25 million in pre-seed funding led by Kindred Ventures.
- 03DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick joined the round as an angel investor.
- 04Founder Sai Kambampati previously worked as a software engineer at Humane.
- 05Kambampati expects on-device models to replace cloud LLMs within 2 to 3 years.
The proactive layer is the differentiator. If Poppy spots a 30-minute gap on a user's calendar and sees they are near a park, it can suggest a walk. If a friend mentioned dietary preferences in an earlier message, Poppy can factor that into a restaurant suggestion for an upcoming brunch. It can also track flights, flag schedule changes, and remind users when to take medication.
“Poppy's pitch is ambient computing: a 30-minute calendar gap near a park becomes a walk suggestion, and a friend's prior food preferences shape the brunch pick.”— Jaeden Schafer
Users can also message Poppy directly with questions or requests, treating it like a personal assistant on retainer. The company's tagline — "Poppy pays attention so you don't have to" — leans into the same passive-collection logic that has powered every smart-assistant pitch since Google Now, but with the added muscle of current-generation LLMs doing the inference.
Access to iMessage requires a companion Mac app, since Apple does not let third-party apps tap into its messaging service directly. That dependency is a known fragility: any future Apple policy change could break a core Poppy use case overnight.
On data handling, Poppy encrypts stored user data and runs a zero-retention policy when routing prompts to cloud-based LLMs for suggestions. The company has not named which model providers it uses on the back end.
Kambampati told TechCrunch that he wants to move off cloud inference entirely once hardware catches up. "My hope, my dream is — within two to three years from now, when our devices have much more powerful compute, and the models get much smaller, cheaper and more high quality — eventually we can have all of this running on our own devices, and there won't even be a need to hit the servers," he said.
Of his motivation, Kambampati added: "I've always been interested in challenging what computers are able to do, especially the idea of ambient computing and computers that can proactively sense what you need and anticipate your needs. That's something that I found very, very exciting. And I felt like with all the AI technology that we're seeing around us, it has never been more possible to embark on something like this."
The skeptical read is straightforward. Proactive assistants are a well-trafficked graveyard — Google Now, Cortana, and Humane's own AI Pin all tried versions of this and failed for different reasons, from accuracy to hardware economics to the simple fact that users find unsolicited suggestions noisy. A 4-person team competing for the same surface area as Apple Intelligence, Gemini on Android, and ChatGPT's memory features needs a clear reason to exist beyond aggregation.
The opening for Poppy is that the incumbents are constrained: Apple by privacy posture and shipping cadence, Google by Android-only reach, OpenAI by not owning the OS. A neutral third-party app that pulls from all of them, runs on a user's existing accounts, and bets that on-device inference will commoditize the cloud layer in 2 to 3 years is a defensible wedge — if Poppy can survive long enough on $1.25 million to see whether Kambampati's timeline holds. The assistant category has been waiting for someone to build the product Humane gestured at without the hardware tax. Poppy is the first credible shot at that thesis in 2026.
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