Era raises $11 million to build a software platform for artificial intelligence tools

Earlier in April, the startup Era held a meeting in New York for artists who received its development kit. The artists showed off the various little gadgets they had made, such as a souvenir that tells you facts and jokes about France, a phone-like device that looks at your stocks and tells you if 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 experimental, what they have in common is the Era platform, which allows device makers to create AI agents and AI hardware formats. The company doesn’t want to create hardware itself, but aims to enable others to do so by providing a software layer that can handle tasks like creating custom audio or adding intelligence to a classic device, like headphones.

The startup has raised $11 million in funding so far. 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 seed funding from Topology Ventures and Betaworks.

Individual angel investors include Flickr co-founder Katrina Fick, iPhone keyboard creator Ken Kosinda, OAS founder Tony Wang, Little Guy co-founder Daniel Koontz, Sandbar co-founder Mina Fahmy, Rabbit CPO ShaoBo Z, and Poetry Camera creator Kelin Zhang.

Era was founded last year by CEO Liz Dorman, CTO Alex Ullman, and CPO Megan Gull. Dorman worked at Humane coordinating artificial intelligence and moved to HP as part of the company’s acquisition. Ullman worked at HP on enterprise frameworks. Gole worked at Sutter Hill Ventures on Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s io project, and later moved to Era.

Era investor Casey Caruso, founder and managing partner at Topology Ventures, said the startup’s orchestration platform stands out because of its dynamic routing across models and managing real-world constraints like connectivity.

Dorman said the basic idea behind Era is to build a platform that can power the next generation of devices, potentially ditching the app model.

“I think one of the amazing things we can do with these AI models today is that you can replace that application layer,” Dorman said. “So what we’re building is the intelligence layer to allow anyone to create these kinds of smart objects and 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 made by people in their high fortresses completely disconnected from reality, making devices and forcing them on everyone. I want to choose between my devices again.”

The company currently offers more than 130 LLMs from more than 14 providers to enable various AI gadget form factors such as glasses, jewelry, and home speakers. Era believes that as more form factors come to the fore, device makers will need a software layer that can handle and infer multimodal inputs to power smart functions.

“You can imagine this layer of intelligence moving to many different types of devices,” she said. “So we think it won’t be limited to just glasses or rings or bracelets. We’ll have a Cambrian explosion of what’s possible, because technology has become a commodity.”

Dorman noted that the startup’s platform is set to scale across millions of devices. Additionally, it can cater to personalized AI device experiences that brands may do to attract specific users.

The startup’s vision is that as more users use AI tools, it wants to enable users to choose their memory providers and models in a privacy-preserving way. Just as she held a demo with artists, she plans to make her platform available to the open source and maker community to show how her platform can run different types of hardware.

The big challenge in the field of AI hardware is that there is no model company that has achieved success. Humane was sold to HP, and Rabbit remained silent. Blood has had some success in the meeting note taking space, while startups like Sandbar and Taya are still early days. However, Era feels that as users see more use cases for AI devices, some will stick with them.