The AI interface market is getting more crowded by the day, and that is no surprise for anyone keeping a close eye on the space.
Smart rings, AI pins, connected glasses, wearables of every kind — it feels like the entire world is racing to launch the next big device capable of capturing what you do, say, or see. Just to give you a sense of scale, there is the Sandbar ring, the Plaud AI pin, Pocket’s credit-card-sized pucks, the Bee and Friend wearables, and smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Bans and Even Realities. Way too many players fighting over the same turf.
But there is a detail that flies under the radar with most of these bets: capturing context is not the same as acting on it.
That is exactly where Aina comes in — the name means mirror in Hindi — a startup based in Bengaluru and San Francisco that showed up with a different approach and $5.5 million in funding to prove that difference matters.
Instead of yet another gadget listening to you all day long, Aina wants to build devices that put you in control of AI agents rather than just recording what happens around you.
It sounds simple, but that shift in perspective could significantly change the way we interact with artificial intelligence on a daily basis. 🤖
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Who is behind Aina
Aina, formerly known as Project Mirage, was founded by Apoorv Shankar, a former VP of Hardware at smart ring maker Ultrahuman. And this guy is no rookie in this space. Before Ultrahuman, Shankar was running LazyCo, a hardware interface design startup that built gadgets — including a ring that let you control other devices like your smartphone. Ultrahuman eventually acquired LazyCo and brought Shankar in-house, until he decided to strike out on his own again.
In his own words, the motivation to leave was pure curiosity about the AI interface space. Shankar said he left Ultrahuman last year because he was fascinated with this area. Devices like the Rabbit and the Humane Pin had just launched, and he admits he had his own disappointments with them. Still, he was excited to see that interfaces were finally becoming a hot topic. As an engineer turned product designer, he described it as the most interesting thing he could imagine building.
The funding round and who bet on it
The $5.5 million funding round was led by Redstart Labs (Info Edge India) and 360 ONE, with participation from MIXI Global Investments, Antler, and the Blume Founders Fund. A seed round of this size is not trivial, especially at a time when the venture capital market is pickier and more demanding with hardware startups — which historically have longer development cycles and tighter margins than pure software companies.
The round also attracted heavyweight individual investors, including newly appointed WhatsApp head Kunal Shah, Razorpay co-founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, and Scribd founder Tikhon Bernstam. The fact that Aina pulled in this kind of money with names like these signals that investors are buying into the thesis that human control over AI agents is a real, urgent problem with significant market potential. 💡
The problem Aina wants to solve
Think about it: most AI wearables out there were built with a similar logic. The device stays on, capturing audio, video, or motion, then processes everything in the background to generate some kind of response or suggestion. The problem is that this approach creates a pretty passive relationship between the user and the technology. You basically hand over control to the machine and hope it does something useful with it. In some cases it works well, but in most everyday situations, this dynamic creates more noise than real value.
Aina identified this gap and decided to flip the script. Shankar made it clear that the company’s next device will not be a passive context-capture gadget — the kind of always-listening ring or Plaud-style notetaker that just records what happens around you. The idea is exactly the opposite: a device designed to control and trigger agents.
According to him, we already have more than enough context on our phones and laptops at all times, and we have not even begun to use it properly yet. Aina’s vision is to build an action-oriented device that uses that context to help you control and trigger workflows. It is an important philosophical shift, and it directly impacts product design and the way language models get activated. 💡
Aina’s first devices in practice
The startup’s first product is Dune, a three-key, context-aware macro keyboard — basically a small keyboard that runs pre-defined shortcuts. It can control your microphone and camera during a meeting and run shortcuts or scripts depending on which app you are using at that moment. It is a simple concept, but surprisingly powerful for anyone juggling multiple tools throughout the day.
But Dune was not the only experiment. Aina developed two other devices. The first is Radiance, a desktop remote for video calls featuring a dial for volume adjustment and buttons for microphone, camera, AI notetaker, voice modulation, and meeting entry. The second is Shift, a single-tap agentic button — you press it once and it fires off an AI agent to handle a repetitive task. This one connects directly to your phone.
During early testing, Aina noticed that Dune was by far the most popular of the three and concluded they could combine features from the other two into the keyboard itself. That signal from users is what made the company decide to launch Dune first. The goal is to learn, in practice and in the real world, what kinds of tasks people actually want to automate. 😅
The technical layer that makes the difference
The technical edge here lies in the way Aina designs the interaction between hardware and software. The devices were built for low latency, fast response, and seamless integration with the most relevant language models on the market. The startup is not reinventing the wheel when it comes to LLMs — it uses the best of what already exists — but it creates a proprietary experience layer that makes the whole thing feel much more natural and efficient than simply opening a chat app on your phone.
Aina said the lessons learned from the three devices will feed into the next product. The company has not revealed details about the new device yet but plans to start testing with a small group of selected users in the coming weeks. This kind of iterative approach, learning from real user behavior before scaling, is exactly what separates a product people actually use from one that ends up in a drawer after two weeks.
It is worth noting that this debate about human agency versus full automation is not new within the interaction design community. Researchers in HCI (human-computer interaction) have been discussing the risks of systems that strip decision-making power from the user for years. What Aina does is bring that conversation into the AI wearables market in a practical way, with a real product and the funding to execute. 🚀
An increasingly heated race for AI hardware
As more developers and knowledge workers adopt AI coding tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, there has been a steady increase in hardware built specifically to control and trigger those agents. Just this week, OpenAI launched a custom keyboard for Codex, made in partnership with Work Louder. And there are plenty of other options out there, ranging from keyboard manufacturers to DIY enthusiasts building their own macro controllers.
There are also reports that OpenAI is developing a smart speaker with a built-in AI assistant, while the Rabbit R1 positions itself as yet another device for invoking AI agents. Qualcomm, for its part, says it is experimenting with over 40 different devices for interacting with artificial intelligence. In other words, nobody has nailed down the winning form factor yet — ring, pin, glasses, keyboard, or speaker.
What all this movement signals is that the race for AI interfaces is entering a more mature phase. It is no longer enough to have a sleek device or a powerful language model onboard. Users are getting more demanding, more privacy-conscious, and more skeptical of products that promise to solve everything automatically. Startups like Aina that arrive with a user-centered approach and clarity about the role of the human in the interaction tend to find a warmer reception — from both the public and investors who see longevity in that approach.
At the end of the day, what Aina represents right now goes beyond just another product in the AI interface market. The startup is raising a question that will become increasingly central as AI agents grow more powerful: who is in charge here, the machine or you? With $5.5 million in funding and a well-defined approach, they have the resources to try answering that question with a real product — and that alone is already a differentiator in a market full of noise and very few concrete deliveries. 🎯
