The promise of AI and large-scale language models (LLM) is the ability to understand ever-wider amounts of context and easily make sense of that information, so it makes sense that we’re seeing a bunch 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, and it raised $7 million in a round led by Exor to build its wearable AI assistant that listens to you to learn about you, take notes, display contextual reminders, and compile lists. The company also has a companion Apple Watch app.
The amount announced today includes $1.5 million in pre-seed funding that the startup previously raised. Greycroft, New Wave VC, Banana Capital and Brian Bedol (an investor and TV executive who previously founded several sports networks) also participated in the new round.
Co-founder and CEO Maria de Lourdes Zolo told TechCrunch that while Bee AI’s main focus is the software powering the assistant, the company has created a wearable device so the app doesn’t have to constantly control the user’s phone’s microphone.
The device and app can be used to perform various tasks as mentioned earlier, but the launch is ambitious. De Lourdes Zollo said the company wants to give every user a “cloud phone” — essentially a mirror of your phone with access to your accounts and notifications. Currently, some of the features in early testing include the ability to read your notifications and receive reminders about important messages and events, write emails or tweets, and receive on-demand shopping suggestions.
Currently, the device 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 road map
Given that generative AI is so new, there are still questions about its ability to infer reliable information, so there is some skepticism in the space that Bee AI is entering. Startups like Rabbit have tried to use AI agents that can go through an interface on your behalf to perform various tasks. However, as early reviews and demos show, the process still doesn’t work reliably.
Still, there are a few startups working on the problem in the hopes that they’ll be the first to get it right: A16z-backed Limitless and Friend are building wearables that promise to do similar things to Bee AI, though the use cases are slightly different. For his part, de Lourdes Zollo believes that AI agents will improve as new models are released, and said that Bee AI takes a conservative approach, focusing on performing only a few tasks.
De Lourdes Zollo founded Bee AI with Ethan Sutin (CTO), who she worked with 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 the engineering lead and de Lourdes Zollo helped the platform launch Twitter Spaces.
The company’s investors seem confident in the team’s pedigree. Ian Sigallow, managing partner at Greycroft, said he saw great potential in the team and decided to invest because of that. “I usually invest in great founding teams. With Bee AI, you have unique team members who are engineering specialists. Many of them worked at a company like Twitter and delivered products to millions of users. I think that’s a great strength.” he told TechCrunch.
Sigalow also thinks there could be great opportunities in building a product that can make robust transfers between hardware and the cloud if you train the big language models well.
There will certainly be some privacy concerns with a device that listens to you all the time in order to function. The product is currently in beta and currently also uses what people close to the user are saying to provide more context and improve the learning of the model for the user. However, prior to launch, the company aims to stop the use of all non-user voices if they have not given verbal consent to be recorded.
And Bee AI claims that its platform does not store any audio recordings and instead only uses transcripts to learn more about the user.
Bee AI will be priced at $49, along with a $19 per month subscription. The company aims to start taking orders before Black Friday.
