In early April, the startup Era hosted a gathering in New York for artists who had received its developer kit. During the event, the artists showcased a range of miniature gadgets they had created, including a souvenir that shares facts and jokes about France, a phone-like device that checks your stock portfolio and tells you if you can finally quit your job, and a gadget that monitors air quality. Although these devices are experimental, they all share a common foundation: Era’s platform, which enables hardware makers to build AI agents and orchestrate AI-powered devices. The company does not intend to manufacture its own devices; instead, it aims to empower others by offering a software layer that can handle tasks such as custom voice creation or adding intelligence to existing devices like headphones.

To date, Era has raised $11 million in funding. This includes a $9 million seed round led by Abstract Ventures and BoxGroup, with additional participation from Collaborative Fund and Mozilla Ventures. Earlier, the company secured $2 million in pre-seed funding from Topology Ventures and Betaworks. Individual angel investors include Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, iPhone keyboard creator Ken Kocienda, OAS founder Tony Wang, Little Guy co-founder Daniel Kuntz, Sandbar co-founder Mina Fahmi, former Rabbit CPO ShaoBo Z, and Poetry Camera creator Kelin Zhang. Era was founded last year by CEO Liz Dorman, CTO Alex Ollman, and CPO Megan Gole. Dorman previously worked at Humane on AI orchestration and moved to HP as part of the company’s acquisition. Ollman worked at HP on agentic frameworks for enterprises. Gole was involved with Sutter Hill Ventures on the Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s io project before transitioning to Era.

Casey Caruso, founder and managing partner at Topology Ventures and an Era investor, noted that the startup’s orchestration platform stands out because of its dynamic routing across models and its ability to manage real-world constraints like connectivity. Dorman explained that the core idea behind Era was to build a platform capable of powering the next generation of devices, which may abandon the traditional app model. “I think one of the incredible things that we can do with these AI models today is that you can replace that app layer. So what we’re building is the intelligence layer to allow anyone to create these types of intelligent objects, intelligent devices. And what we really believe is that the future of tech should not be made by people in San Francisco…It should not be people in their high fortresses who are so out of touch with reality, making devices and forcing them onto everyone. I want a choice over my devices again,” Dorman said.

Currently, Era provides over 130 large language models from more than 14 providers, supporting various AI gadget form factors such as glasses, jewelry, and home speakers. The company believes that as more form factors emerge, hardware makers will need a software layer capable of handling multimodal inputs and inference to power intelligent functions. “You can imagine this intelligence layer going to many different types of hardware. So we believe it’s not gonna be just glasses or rings or just bracelets. We’re gonna have a Cambrian explosion of what’s possible, and this is because tech is commoditized,” she said. Dorman noted that the platform is designed to scale across millions of devices and can cater to custom AI device experiments that brands may undertake to appeal to specific users. The startup’s vision is that as more users adopt AI gadgets, it wants to enable users to choose their own memory and model providers in a privacy-preserving way.

Just as it held a showcase with artists, Era plans to make its platform available to the open source and maker community to demonstrate how it can power different types of devices. A significant challenge in the AI hardware space is that no company has yet found a proven successful model. Humane was sold to HP, and Rabbit has remained quiet. Plaud has found some success in the meeting note-taking space, while startups like Sandbar and Taya are still in early stages. However, Era believes that as users encounter more use cases for AI devices, some will become lasting fixtures in their lives.