Earlier in April, the startup Era held a gathering in New York for artists who had received its developer kit. The artists showed off the various mini gadgets they had built, like a souvenir that tells you facts and jokes about France, a phone-like device that looks at your stocks and tells if today is the day you can quit your job, or a gadget that tells you about air quality.
While all these devices are experimental, the common thread is Era’s platform, which allows hardware makers to create AI agents and orchestrations for AI devices. The company doesn’t want to create devices itself, but aims to enable others to do so by providing a software layer that could handle tasks like customized voice creation or adding intelligence to a classic device, 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. Previously, the company had 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 transitioned to HP as part of the company’s acquisition. Ollman worked at HP on agentic frameworks for enterprises. Gole worked at Sutter Hill Ventures on the Jony Ive and Sam Altman io project, and then later transitioned to Era.
Era investor Casey Caruso, who is a founder and managing partner at Topology Ventures, said that the startup’s orchestration platform stands out because of its dynamic routing across models and managing real-world constraints like connectivity.
Dorman said that the core idea behind Era was to build a platform that could power the next generation of devices, which might ditch 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 app layer. So what we’re building is the intelligence layer to allow anyone to create these types of intelligent objects, intelligent devices. And what we really believe is that the future of tech should not be made by people in San Francisco…It should not be people in their high fortresses who are so out of touch with reality, making devices and forcing them onto everyone. I want a choice over my devices again,” Dorman said.
Currently, the company provides over 130 LLMs from more than 14 providers to enable different AI gadget form factors such as glasses, jewelry, and home speakers. Era thinks that as more form factors come to the forefront, hardware makers will need a software layer that can handle multimodal inputs and inference for them to power intelligent functions.
“You can imagine this intelligence layer going to many different types of hardware. So we believe it’s not gonna be just glasses or rings or just bracelets. We’re gonna have a Cambrian explosion of what’s possible, and this is because tech is commoditized,” she said.
Dorman noted that the startup’s platform is set up to scale across millions of devices. Plus, it can cater to custom AI device experiments that brands might do to appeal to certain users.
The startup’s vision is that as more users adopt AI gadgets, it wants to enable users to choose their own memory and model providers in a privacy-preserving way. Just like it held a showcase 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 AI hardware space is that there isn’t a model of a company that has found success. Humane was sold to HP, and Rabbit has been silent. Plaud has found some success in the meeting note-taking space, while startups like Sandbar and Taya are early. However, Era feels that as users see more use cases of AI devices, some will stick with them.