Earlier in April, First Era hosted a gathering of artists who had acquired their engineering kit in New York. The artists showed various small gadgets that they had built, such as a souvenir that tells you facts and jokes about France, a phone-like device that looks at your stocks and tells you that today is the day you can quit your job, or a gadget that tells you about the air quality.
While all of these devices are being tested, the common thread is the Era platform, which allows hardware makers to build AI agents and orchestrations of AI devices. The company doesn’t want to create the devices themselves, but aims to enable others to do so by providing a software layer that can handle tasks like customizing voice or adding intelligence to an old device, like headphones.
The startup has raised $11 million so far. This includes a $9 million investment 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 founder Caterina Fake, iPhone keyboard creator Ken Kocienda, OAS founder Tony Wang, Little Guy founder Daniel Kuntz, Sandbar co-founder Mina Fahmi, former Rabbit CPO founder 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 in AI orchestration and switched to HP as part of the company’s acquisition. Ollman has worked at HP in business agent roles. Gole Sutter Hill Ventures in the io project of Jony Ive and Sam Altman, and later switched to Era.
Era investor Casey Caruso, co-founder and managing partner at Topology Ventures, said the orchestration startup’s platform stands out because of its flexible approach across models and handling real-world constraints like connectivity.
Dorman said the main idea behind Era was to create a platform that could power the next generation of devices, which would potentially ditch the app model.
“I think one of the best things we can do with these AI models today is that you can replace that application layer. So what we’re building is an intelligence layer that allows anyone to do these kinds of smart things, 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 who are in very high places and want to be in touch with all the real people. Choice over my machines again,” said Dorman.
Currently, the company offers more than 130 LLMs from more than 14 suppliers to enable various aspects of AI gadgets such as glasses, jewelry, and home speakers. Era thinks that as more form factors come to the fore, hardware makers will need a software layer that can handle multimodal inputs and their interpretation to enable smart functions.
“You can imagine this layer of intelligence going to many different types of hardware. So we believe it’s not going to be just glasses or rings or bracelets. We’re going to have a Cambrian explosion of what’s possible, and this is because the technology is being sold,” he said.
Dorman noted that the startup’s platform is set to scale to millions of devices. Also, it can handle custom AI device testing that products might do to attract specific users.
The startup’s idea is that as more users use AI gadgets, it wants to enable users to choose their own memory and model providers in a way that preserves privacy. Just as it held a show with artists, it plans to make its platform available to open source and the maker community to show that its platform can power different types of devices.
The biggest challenge in the AI hardware space is that no company model has achieved success. Humane has been sold to HP, and Rabbit is silent. Plaud has found some success in tapping into the note-taking space, while startups like Sandbar and Taya are still early days. However, Era feels that as users see more uses for AI devices, others will stick with them.
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