Earlier in April, the startup Time held a gathering in New York for artists who had received his developer kit. The artists showed the various mini gadgets they had made, as a souvenir that tells you facts and anecdotes about Francea phone-like device that looks at your stocks and tells if today is the day you can quit your jobor a gadget that tells you about air quality.
While all of these devices are experimental, the common thread is Era’s platform, which allows hardware makers to build AI agents and orchestrations for AI devices. The company doesn’t want to build devices itself, but aims to enable others to do so by providing a software layer that could handle tasks like custom voice generation or adding intelligence to a classic device like a headset.
The startup has raised $11 million in funding to date. This includes a $9 million seed round led by Abstract Ventures and BoxGroup, with participation from Collaborative Fund and Mozilla Ventures. Previously, the company raised $2 million in pre-seed funding from Topology Ventures and Betaworks.
Individual angel investors include Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, iPhone keyboard creator Ken Kocienda, OAS founder Tony Wang, Little Guy co-founder Daniel Kuntz, Sandbar co-founder Mina Fahmi, former Rabbit CPO ShaoBo Z, and Poetry Camera creator Kelin Zhang.
Era was founded last year by CEO Liz Dorman, CTO Alex Ollman and CPO Megan Gole. Dorman worked at Humane on AI orchestration and moved to HP as part of the company’s acquisition. Ollman worked at HP in enterprise agent agencies. Gole worked at Sutter Hill Ventures on the Jony Ive and Sam Altman io project and then moved to Era.
Era investor Casey Caruso, who is a founder and managing partner at Topology Ventures, said the startup’s orchestration platform stands out because of its dynamic routing in models and handling of real-world constraints like connectivity.
Dorman said the core idea behind Era was to build a platform that could power the next generation of devices, which could bypass the app model.
“I think one of the incredible things that we can do with these AI models today is that you can replace that application layer. So what we’re building is the layer of intelligence that allows anyone to build these types of smart objects, smart devices. And what we really believe is that the future of technology shouldn’t be made by people in San Francisco… It shouldn’t be people reaching up to their devices that high. I want a selection from my devices,” Dorman said.
Currently, the company provides over 130 LLMs from more than 14 providers to enable different form factors of AI gadgets, such as glasses, jewelry and home speakers. Era believes that as more form factors come to the fore, hardware manufacturers will need a software layer that can handle multimodal inputs and make inferences to power intelligent functions.
“You can imagine that level of intelligence going into many different types of hardware. So we think it’s not just going to be glasses or rings or just bracelets. We’re going to have a Cambrian explosion of what’s possible, and that’s because the technology is being commercialized,” he said.
Dorman noted that the startup’s platform is configured to cover millions of devices. In addition, it can serve customized AI device experiments that brands can do to engage certain users.
The startup’s vision is that as more users adopt AI gadgets, it wants to enable users to choose their own memory providers and models in a privacy-preserving way. Just as it did an exhibition with artists, it plans to make its platform available to the open source and maker community to show how its platform can power different kinds of devices.
A big challenge in the hardware AI space is that there is no company model that has succeeded. Humane was sold to HP and Rabbit went silent. Plaud has found some success in the meeting note-taking space, while startups like Sandbar and Taya are early adopters. However, Era believes that as users see more use cases for AI devices, some will stick with them.
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