Image source: Bee AI

The promise of AI and large language models (LLMs) is to be able to understand more and more context, and easily understand that information, so it makes sense that we're seeing a lot of companies trying to make wearable hardware so that people can use AI in their daily lives.

The latest entrant into the space is Bee AI, which raised $7 million in a funding round led by Exor to develop a wearable AI assistant that can listen to you, learn more about you, take notes, display contextual alerts, and build lists. The company also launched a companion Apple Watch app.

The amount disclosed today includes a $1.5 million seed financing previously raised by the company. Greycroft, New Wave VC, Banana Capital, and Brian Bedol (an investor and TV executive who has founded several sports networks) are also involved in the new round.

Image source: Bee AI

Maria de Lourdes Zollo, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that while Bee AI's core focus is on the software that powers assistants, the company built a wearable device so that the app doesn't need to constantly control the user's phone microphone.

As mentioned earlier, the device and app can be used to perform a variety of tasks, but the startup is ambitious. De Lourdes Zollo said the company wants to provide every consumer with a "cloud phone" – basically a mirror of your phone that can access your account and notifications. Currently, some of the features in early testing include reading notifications, getting alerts for important information and events, composing emails or tweets, and getting shopping recommendations on demand.

The device currently only has a mute button to stop recording, but the company is exploring how to use the button to trigger commands.

Image source: Bee AI

Opportunities and roadmaps

Given that generative AI is still new and its ability to output reliable information remains questionable, there is skepticism about the field Bee AI is entering. Startups like Rabbit have experimented with AI agents that can traverse the interface on your behalf to complete a variety of tasks. However, as early reviews and demonstrations have shown, this process has not yet worked reliably.

Still, there are some startups that are struggling to solve this problem and want to be the first to do so: A16z-backed Limitless and Friend are both developing wearables that promise to implement similar capabilities to Bee AI, albeit with slightly different use cases. de Lourdes Zollo believes that AI agents will continue to improve as new models are released.

De Lourdes Zollo co-founded Bee AI with Ethan Sutin (CTO), who previously worked at video chat app Squad, and Sutin co-founded the app with Esther Crawford, who is also an angel investor in Bee AI. They also worked at Twitter, where Sutin was the head of engineering, and de Lourdes Zollo helped develop Twitter Spaces.

The company's investors seem to be confident in the team's pedigree. Greycroft's managing partner, Ian Sigalow, said he saw great potential in the team and decided to invest. "I usually invest in great founding teams. For Bee AI, you have unique team members who are all experts in engineering. Many of them have worked for companies like Twitter and have delivered products to millions of users. I think that's a big plus," he told TechCrunch.

Sigalow also sees a huge opportunity to train large language models well and create a product that can reliably switch between hardware and the cloud.

For a device to work properly, it has to listen to you at all times, which inevitably raises some privacy concerns. The product, which is currently in beta, also uses what people around the user say to provide more context and improve what the model knows about the user. Prior to the launch, though, the company aims to stop using users' voices without their verbal consent to the recording.

Moreover, Bee AI claims that its platform does not store any audio recordings and will only use transcripts to learn more about the user.

Bee AI is available for $49 and costs $19 for a monthly subscription. The company's goal is to start accepting orders by Black Friday. 

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