Secretive ‘Wearable Camera’ Startup With Ex-Apple Execs Secures $100 Million, Partners With OpenAI

WSJ reports that a new investment round of $100 million has been secured by a secretive startup called Humane Inc., founded by ex-Apple executives, along with a partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. Although the startup’s device is shrouded in mystery, it seems to be developing a wearable camera powered by artificial intelligence.

According to data pulled from Crunchbase, a Series C round of $100 million was raised on March 8. It attracted a long list of top investors, including Kindred Ventures (which led the round), SK Networks, LG Technology Ventures, Microsoft, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Tiger Global, Qualcomm Ventures, and OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman.

“This Series C round presented an opportunity to raise money through equity, and to bring on board great VCs and strategic partners who would like to participate in equity as the company grows,” founder Chaudhri Bongiorno told TechCrunch in an email interview. 

“At Humane, we’re building a first-of-its-kind device and services platform — we’re growing fast, and we’ve been focused on innovation, research and development,” he said. 

According to The Verge, the startup is developing a wearable camera device that would allow the user to have access to AI technology at all times. It sounds like this is ChatGPT on steroids… 

A leaked investor pitch deck from 2021 revealed by tech blog Daring Fireball describes the device as a camera that “captures moments you didn’t think to capture” or “moments you want to recall.”

The slide deck continues: The AI software with the wearable camera will be able to create compositions of images and videos captured by the device in different styles like a documentary, candid, landscape, lifestyle, photojournalism, filmmaking, and sports.

The deck also said: “You can mark them [the photos and videos] by tapping record, and those moments will be cued to be processed on the server so you can recall them in different styles, either as images or videos.”

Users could have the ability to ask the device questions about their surroundings, such as “What is the name of that building?” or “What type of car is that?”

Other features include “Memory recall,” “Senior monitoring,” and even “Personal live broadcasting.” 

The arrival of AI-powered wearable technologies has raised concerns regarding privacy issues, given the nature of these intelligent devices that constantly monitor our daily lives.