The promise of AI and large language models (LLMs) is the ability to understand an increasingly broader range of contexts and make sense of that information easily, so it's no surprise that many companies are working on wearable hardware to help people 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 a wearable AI assistant that listens to users, learns about them, takes notes, gives contextual reminders, and creates lists. The company also offers a companion app for the Apple Watch.
The amount disclosed today includes $1.5 million in pre-seed funding the startup previously raised. Greycroft, New Wave VC, Banana Capital and Brian Bedol (an investor and TV executive who has previously founded several sports networks) also participated in the new round.
Image credit: Bee AI
Co-founder and CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo told TechCrunch that while Bee AI's core focus is the software that powers the assistant, the company developed the device as a wearable so the app doesn't need constant control over a user's phone microphone.
As mentioned, the device and app can be used for a variety of tasks, but the startup is ambitious. De Lourdes Zollo said the company wants to give each consumer a “cloud phone,” which is essentially a mirror of their mobile phone with access to their accounts and notifications. Features currently in early testing include the ability to read notifications, get reminders about important messages and events, write emails and tweets, and receive on-demand shopping suggestions.
The device currently only has a mute button to stop recording, but the company is also exploring ways to use the button to trigger commands.
Image credit: Bee AI
Opportunities and Roadmap
Because generative AI is so new, there are still questions about whether it can output trustworthy information, which is why some are skeptical of the field Bee AI is trying to enter. Startups such as Rabbit have experimented with using AI agents that can traverse interfaces and perform various tasks on a user's behalf, but as early reviews and demos suggest, the process doesn't yet work reliably.
Still, there are several startups tackling the problem in hopes of getting the answer right the first time. A16z-backed Limitless and Friend are both developing wearables with similar capabilities to Bee AI but addressing slightly different use cases. Meanwhile, de Lourdes Zollo says he thinks AI agents will improve as new models are released, and that Bee AI is taking a conservative approach by focusing on a few tasks.
De Lourdes Zollo founded Bee AI alongside Ethan Sutin (CTO), who previously worked with Esther Crawford (also an angel investor in Bee AI) when they founded the video chat app Squad, and the two also worked at Twitter, where Sutin was an engineering lead and De Lourdes Zollo helped launch the Twitter Spaces platform.
The company's investors seem confident in the team's track record. Ian Sigalow, managing partner at Greycroft, said he sees great potential in the team and that's why he decided to invest. “I typically invest in great founding teams. Bee AI has unique team members who are engineering gurus. Many of them have worked at companies like Twitter and shipped products to millions of users. I think that's a huge advantage,” he told TechCrunch.
Sigalow also believes there is a huge opportunity to build products that can perform reliable handoffs between hardware and the cloud, provided that large-scale language models are properly trained.
There are bound to be privacy concerns about a device that constantly listens to its users to function. The product is currently in beta and currently also uses what people around the user say to provide more context and help the model learn more about the user. But before launch, the company aims to stop using the voices of all non-users who haven't verbally consented to being recorded.
Additionally, Bee AI claims that its platform does not store any voice recordings, instead only using transcripts to learn more about its users.
Bee AI will cost $49, which includes a $19 monthly subscription, and the company plans to start taking orders before Black Friday.