Bee AI raised $7 million for their wearable AI companion that learns from your chats

The promise of AI and large language models (LLMs) is the ability to understand increasingly large amounts of context and easily make sense of that information, so it's no surprise that a slew of companies are developing wearable hardware so that people can use AI in their daily lives.

Bee AI, the latest player in this market, has secured $7 million in a round lead by Exor to develop its wearable AI assistant, which listens to you to learn more about you, takes notes, surfaces contextual reminders, and builds lists. The company also offers a companion Apple Watch app.

The amount reported today includes $1.5 million in pre-seed capital raised by the business before. Greycroft, New Wave VC, Banana Capital, and Brian Bedol (an investor and TV executive who previously created a variety of sports networks) all participated in the latest round.

Co-founder and CEO Maria de Lourdes Zollo told TechCrunch that, while Bee AI's primary focus is the software that powers the assistant, the business created a wearable so that the app does not continually take control of a user's phone microphone.

As previously said, the device and app can be used to perform a variety of jobs; nevertheless, the startup is ambitious. De Lourdes Zollo said the business wants to give each user a “cloud phone” — effectively a mirror of your phone with access to your accounts and notifications. Some of the capabilities now under early testing include the ability to read notifications and receive reminders about key messages and events, create emails or tweets, and receive shopping recommendations on demand.

The device presently only includes a mute button to halt recording, but the business is looking on methods to use the button to execute orders.

Opportunity and Roadmap

Nonetheless, a few startups are working on the problem, hoping to be the first to do it right: Limitless and Friend, both funded by A16z, are developing wearables that promise to perform comparable functions as Bee AI, however their use cases differ slightly. For her part, de Lourdes Zollo believes that AI agents will improve when new models are introduced, and that Bee AI is taking a conservative approach by focussing on only a few jobs.

De Lourdes Zollo founded Bee AI with Ethan Sutin (CTO), whom she previously worked with at video chat app Squad, which he co-founded with Esther Crawford (also an angel investor in Bee AI). They also worked at Twitter, where Sutin was an engineering lead and de Lourdes Zollo helped launch Twitter Spaces.

The company's investors appear to be confidence in the team's pedigree. Ian Sigalow, managing partner of Greycroft, stated that he saw significant potential in the team and chose to invest because of it. "I often invest in strong founding teams. Bee AI provides you with a one-of-a-kind team of engineering experts. Many of them had previously worked for companies such as Twitter, where they sold products to millions of people. "I believe that is a great strength," he said. 

Sigalow also believes that if huge language models are properly trained, there may be significant prospects for developing a product capable of performing solid handoffs between hardware and the cloud.

There will undoubtedly be some privacy concerns with a device that constantly listens to you in order to function. The product is now in beta and uses what individuals in the user's area say to add more context and improve the model's understanding of the user. However, before the launch, the business intends to stop using non-users' voices if they have not given verbal authorisation to be recorded.

Bee AI says that their platform does not save audio recordings and instead relies solely on transcripts to learn more about the user.

Bee AI will be priced at $49 with a $19 monthly subscription. The company plans to begin taking orders before Black Friday.