In early April, startup Era held a gathering in New York for artists who had received developer kits. The artists showed off a variety of mini-gadgets they’ve created, including souvenirs that tell facts and jokes about France, a phone-like device that looks at stock prices and lets you know if it’s a good day to quit work, and a gadget that tells you about air quality.
All of these devices are experimental, but what they have in common is Era’s platform that allows hardware manufacturers to create AI agents and orchestration for AI devices. The company doesn’t intend to create its own devices, but aims to help others create them by providing a software layer that can handle tasks such as customized voice creation and adding intelligence to traditional devices such as headphones.
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. The company previously 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 on AI orchestration at Humane and moved to HP as part of the company’s acquisition. Ollman worked at HP developing agent frameworks for enterprises. Gole worked on Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s io project at Sutter Hill Ventures before moving to Era.
Era investor Casey Caruso, founder and managing partner of Topology Ventures, said what makes the startup’s orchestration platform stand out is its ability to manage real-world constraints such as dynamic routing and connectivity between models.
Dorman said the core idea behind Era was to build a platform that could power next-generation devices that could potentially do away with the app model.
“I think one of the great things we can do today with these AI models is be able to replace that app layer. So what we’re building is these kinds of intelligent objects, intelligent It’s a layer of intelligence that allows anyone to create a device. And what we really believe is that the future of technology shouldn’t be created by people in San Francisco… People in a high fortress far removed from reality should create a device and impose it on everyone. I need to choose my device again.
The company currently offers more than 130 LLMs from more than 14 providers, enabling a variety of AI gadget form factors such as glasses, jewelry, and home speakers. Era believes that as more form factors come to the forefront, hardware manufacturers will need a software layer that can handle multimodal input and inference to enhance intelligent capabilities.
“You can imagine this layer of intelligence moving into different types of hardware. So we believe it’s not just glasses or rings or just bracelets. We’re going to have a Cambrian explosion of possibilities, and that’s because technology is commoditized,” she said.
Dorman noted that the startup’s platform is set up to scale across millions of devices. Additionally, we can support experiments with custom AI devices that brands use to appeal to specific audiences.
The startup’s vision is that as more users adopt AI gadgets, they want to allow users to choose their own memory and model providers while protecting their privacy. Just as it held showcases with artists, the company plans to make its platform available to the open source and maker communities to demonstrate how it can power different types of devices.
A major challenge in the AI hardware space is the lack of a successful company model. Humane was sold to HP and Rabbit has remained silent. While Plaud has had some success in the meeting note-taking space, startups like Sandbar and Taya are in their early stages. However, Era feels that as users see more use cases for AI devices, some will stick with them.
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