Earlier in April, the startup Era held a gathering of artists who had received its developer kit in New York. The artists showed off the various mini gadgets they had built, like a souvenir that tells you facts and jokes about France, a phone-like device that looks at your stocks and tells if today is the day you can quit your job, or a gadget that tells you about air quality.
While all these devices are experimental, the common thread is Era’s platform, which allows hardware makers to create AI agents and orchestrations for AI devices. The company doesn’t want to create devices itself, but aims to enable others to do so by providing a software layer that could handle tasks like customized voice creation or adding intelligence to a classic device, such as headphones.
The startup has raised $11 million in funding to date. This includes a $9 million seed round led by Abstract Ventures and BoxGroup, with participation from Collaborative Fund and Mozilla Ventures. Previously, the company had raised $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, ex 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 worked at Humane on AI orchestration and transitioned to HP as part of the company’s acquisition. Ollman worked at HP on agentic frameworks for enterprises. Gole Sutter Hill Ventures on the Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s io project, and then later transitioned to Era.
Era investor Casey Caruso, who is a founder and managing partner at Topology Ventures, said that t …