
Teen founder raises $1.25M uncapped to build AI desktop assistant
Attention.inc, the startup developing a desktop-native AI assistant that continuously learns from real workflows, has announced an uncapped $1.25 million pre-seed raise.
The round is backed by a high-profile roster of investors, including Lukas Haas (DeepMind, Sequoia Scout), Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegal (co-founders, Interaction), Silas Alberti (founding team, Cognition), Village Global, Liquid 2 Ventures, Everyday Intelligence (Viet Le and Christoph Deckert), Bryan Pellegrino (co-founder, LayerZero), and others.
Modern desktop life is full of repetitive, multi-app tasks. Attention.inc transforms these workflows into a personal AI co-pilot that anticipates actions, automates sequences, and will soon execute tasks autonomously, helping users save time and focus on what matters. Building on early tools like Rewind.ai, the assistant observes, interprets, and acts on real user activity across professional, creative, and personal workflows.
Young founders assembling a global technical team
Attention.inc was founded by 19-year-old Canadian Aidan Guo and 23-year-old European Julian Windeck. Guo started building businesses at 13, growing sneaker resale group PremeProfits to $300,000 ARR and co-founding eco-stationery company Fern, exited at $120,000 ARR. After high school, he left Carnegie Mellon, moved to San Francisco, and gained recognition as a Z-Fellow and Emergent Ventures winner.
Windeck brings advanced technical expertise from PhD research at Cambridge under Martin Kleppman, plus research experience at MIT and Berkeley, and prior work in computer vision. Their founding team also includes top graduates from Cambridge and ETH, and Cole Lee, a social media creator with 220k+ followers and prior experience at Windsurf/Cognition. Together, they are building a globally distributed team focused on redefining productivity software.
“Canada has incredible talent, but the support systems, capital, and flexibility available in the U.S is what made it possible for us to build this team and scale fast,” said Guo. “I left school, moved across the continent, and lived on couches to find the right environment to take this idea from early experiments to a real product. In Canada, that kind of opportunity just isn’t as accessible yet.”
Investor confidence in a new generation of founders
Investors backing Attention.inc include elite AI research scouts, founders who have scaled companies, and cross-sector angels. Their support reflects confidence in the startup’s ability to automate everyday desktop workflows and underscores a broader trend of young technical founders building world-class teams and attracting top investors.
“Attention.inc is taking what early tools like Rewind.ai started and pushing it further, turning observation into action,” said Marvin von Hagen. “The team’s technical depth, speed, and ambition are exceptional. Backing them reflects a larger trend: the world’s youngest technical founders are building world-class teams capable of delivering breakthrough products.”
The pre-seed funding will expand engineering capacity across machine learning, systems, and privacy, accelerate development of proactive execution features, and establish enterprise pilots with early adopter teams. Attention.inc will maintain a distributed hiring strategy, keeping engineering talent in Cambridge, Zurich, and Munich, while building product and go-to-market presence in San Francisco and London.
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