Humane AI Pin

Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, former Apple design leads who worked on the original iPhone and iOS for 15+ years, found Humane in San Francisco. Vision: a post-smartphone computing device for the AI era. Raise seed from Salesforce Ventures. Key early investor: Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) personally invests, lending significant AI credibility. Qualcomm Ventures and Tiger Global join subsequent rounds.

Humane raises $100M Series C, bringing total to $230M. Salesforce Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Tiger Global, Microsoft, OpenAI's fund, LG Technology Ventures all participate. The AI Pin is teased publicly: a wearable camera-projector-mic that replaces the smartphone. Hype peaks: if anyone can build the post-phone device, it is the team that built the phone. Hardware stealth period ends.

AI Pin launches May 2024 at $699 + $24/month. Reviews are uniformly catastrophic. MKBHD: 'The worst product I have ever reviewed' (12M views). The Verge: 'This is not the future.' Core problems: laser projector unreadable in sunlight, AI responses slow and often wrong, battery life 2-3 hours, device overheats, no compelling use case over smartphone. Return rate reportedly exceeds unit sales. Company enters crisis.

HP announces acquisition of Humane's AI software and IP assets for $116M in May 2025 — a 50% loss on $230M invested. The AI Pin is discontinued. Humane's team and technology assets absorbed into HP's AI division. The post-smartphone wearable computing vision is not dead; the specific product implementation failed to solve it. Apple, Meta, and Google continue pursuing similar visions with larger resources.