Microsoft acquires Cove team and Cove product shuts down April 1

In short: Cove is closing its product on April 1, 2026 after its team joined Microsoft in an undisclosed acquisition.

What happened

Cove, a startup backed by Sequoia Capital, said it will shut down its software on April 1, 2026. The company had fewer than 10 employees. Its founders and team are joining Microsoft, but the terms of the deal were not shared.

Cove was founded in 2023 by Stephen Chau, Mike Chu, and Andy Szybalski. Chau previously led product at Uber Eats, and the other founders worked with him on Google Maps. Cove raised $6 million in seed funding in 2024.

Cove’s product aimed to make working with AI feel more like working on a shared project, not just typing into a single chat window. It turned AI chats into a visual workspace, like a digital whiteboard where ideas and outputs can be organized. Over time, it also supported custom AI apps, which are AI tools built for specific tasks.

Chau wrote on LinkedIn that the team is excited to keep pursuing this goal at Microsoft. The timing fits with Microsoft’s wider push to get more people using Copilot, its built-in AI helper across Microsoft products. Microsoft has recently added features like Copilot Cowork, which can handle background tasks across Microsoft 365 apps, and it uses models including /claude.

Why it matters

If you used Cove, the shutdown means the service will stop working after April 1. There is no public, detailed plan yet for how customer data will be handled, so users should contact Cove directly to ask about data export and deletion.

Source: TechCrunch AI