Era raises $11M to develop a software platform for AI gadgets

In early April, Era hosted a meetup in New York for artists who had received its developer kit. These artists showcased the mini gadgets they had built, such as a souvenir that shares facts and jokes about France, a phone-like device that monitors your stock portfolio and tells you if today is the day you can quit your job, and a device that provides air quality information.

Although these devices are experimental, they share a common thread: Era's platform, which enables hardware makers to build AI agents and orchestrations for AI devices. The company does not want to create devices itself; instead, it aims to empower others by providing a software layer that handles tasks like custom voice creation or adding intelligence to classic devices such as headphones.

Era has raised $11 million in funding so far, including 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 pre-seed funding from Topology Ventures and Betaworks.

Individual angel investors include Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr; Ken Kocienda, creator of the iPhone keyboard; Tony Wang, founder of OAS; Daniel Kuntz, co-founder of Little Guy; Mina Fahmi, co-founder of Sandbar; ShaoBoZ, former CPO of Rabbit; and Kelin Zhang, creator of the Poetry Camera.

Era was founded last year by CEO Liz Dorman, CTO Alex Ollman, and CPO Megan Gole. Dorman previously worked at Humane on AI orchestration and moved to HP as part of the acquisition. Ollman worked at HP on enterprise agentic frameworks. Gole worked on the Jony Ive and Sam Altman's io project at Sutter Hill Ventures, and later joined Era.

Casey Caruso, an investor in Era and founder and managing partner at Topology Ventures, noted that the startup's orchestration platform stands out due to its dynamic routing across models and its ability to manage real-world constraints such as connectivity.

Dorman stated that the core idea behind Era was to create a platform that could power the next generation of devices, potentially moving away from the app model.

"I think one of the incredible things we can do with today's AI models is replace the app layer. So we're building an intelligence layer that allows anyone to create intelligent objects and devices. We truly believe that the future of tech should not be made by people in San Francisco — people in their high fortresses, out of touch with reality, making devices and forcing them on everyone. I want to have a choice over my devices again," Dorman said.

Currently, Era offers over 130 large language models from more than 14 providers, supporting various AI gadget form factors like glasses, jewelry, and home speakers.

Era believes that as more form factors emerge, hardware makers will need a software layer capable of handling multimodal inputs and inference to power intelligent functions.

"You can imagine this intelligence layer extending to many different types of hardware. We believe it won't be just glasses, rings, or bracelets. We're going to see a Cambrian explosion of possibilities, and that's because technology is becoming commoditized," she said.

Dorman noted that the platform is designed to scale across millions of devices. It can also support custom AI device experiments that brands may conduct to appeal to specific user groups.

Era's vision is that as more users adopt AI gadgets, it wants to give users the ability to choose their own memory and model providers in a privacy-preserving manner. Just as it held a showcase with artists, it plans to make its platform available to the open-source and maker communities to demonstrate how it can power a variety of devices.

A major challenge in the AI hardware space is that no company has yet established a proven success model. Humane was acquired by HP, and Rabbit has been quiet. Plaud has found some success in the meeting note-taking space, while startups like Sandbar and Taya are still early-stage. However, Era believes that as users encounter more use cases for AI devices, some will become habitual.