The promise of AI and large language models (LLMs) is the ability to understand increasingly large amounts of context and make sense of that information easily. So it makes sense that we’re seeing a lot of companies trying to make wearable hardware so people can use AI in their daily lives.
The latest entrant in this space is Bee AI, which raised $7 million in a round led by Exor to develop its wearable AI assistant that listens to you to learn more about you, takes notes, pops up contextual reminders, and creates lists. The company also has a companion app for Apple Watch.
The amount announced today includes $1.5 million in pre-seed funding that the startup had already raised. Greycroft, New Wave VC, Banana Capital, and Brian Bedol (an investor and TV executive who has already founded a few sports networks) also participated in this new round.
Co-founder and CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo told TechCrunch that while Bee AI’s primary focus is the software that powers the assistant, the company built a wearable so the app doesn’t need to constantly take control of a user’s phone’s microphone.
The device and app can be used to perform a variety of tasks, as mentioned earlier, but the startup is ambitious. Lourdes Zollo said the company wants to offer every consumer a “cloud phone” — essentially a mirror of your phone with access to your accounts and notifications. At the moment, some of the features in early testing include the ability to read your notifications and get reminders about important messages and events, write emails or tweets, and get on-demand shopping suggestions.
The device currently only has a mute button to stop recording, but the company is exploring ways to use the button to trigger commands as well.
The opportunity and the roadmap
Given that generative AI is so new, there are still questions about its ability to produce reliable insights, leading to some skepticism about the space Bee AI is entering. Startups like Rabbit have tried using AI agents that can navigate an interface on your behalf to perform various tasks. However, as early reviews and demos suggest, the process doesn’t work reliably yet.
Still, a few startups are working on the problem in hopes of being the first to do it: Limitless and A16z-backed Friend are both developing wearables that promise to do similar things to Bee AI, though the use cases they address are slightly different. For her part, de Lourdes Zollo believes AI agents will improve as new models are released, and said Bee AI takes a conservative approach by focusing on just a few tasks.
De Lourdes Zollo founded Bee AI with Ethan Sutin (CTO), with whom she worked on the video chat app Squad, which he founded with Esther Crawford (also an angel investor in Bee AI). They also worked at Twitter, where Sutin was head of engineering, and de Lourdes Zollo helped the platform launch Twitter Spaces.
The company’s investors appear to have confidence in the team’s pedigree. Ian Sigalow, Greycroft’s managing partner, said he saw great potential in the team and decided to invest for that reason. “I typically invest in great founding teams. With Bee AI, you have unique team members who are engineering experts. Many of them have worked at a company like Twitter and shipped products to millions of users. I think that’s a big strength,” he told TechCrunch.
Sigalow also thinks there could be big opportunities in building a product that can do robust handoffs between hardware and the cloud if you train large language models well.
There are bound to be privacy concerns about a device that constantly listens to you in order to function. The product is currently in beta and also uses what people near the user say to provide more context and improve the model’s knowledge of the user. However, before launch, the company aims to stop using all non-user voices if they haven’t given verbal consent to be recorded.
And Bee AI claims its platform does not store any audio recordings and only uses transcriptions to learn more about the user.
Bee AI will retail for $49, with a $19 monthly subscription. The company aims to start taking orders before Black Friday.
techcrunch
