Just a month after launching its much-hyped Ai Pin, a report in Bloomberg says Humane is looking to get acquired.
Specifically, the company is looking to sell for a reported $750 million to $1 billion, which sounds like a lot of money for a startup that just released its first product. But it’s also been reported that Humane previously raised funding at $850 million valuation, so this probably wouldn’t be a big win for investors.
Before launch, there was a lot of excitement about the Ai Pin as the beginning wave of new devices that could finally make hardware exciting again and push beyond the familiar old smartphone form factor.
The actual launch, however, was bumpy. In fact, the popular tech pundit Marques Brownlee, known as MKBHD, described the Ai Pin as the worst product he’d ever reviewed. Other reviews weren’t quite as dramatic, but they were still pretty scathing.
All of this reflects the weird moment that AI is in right now. Startups, VCs and giant tech companies alike are all making big bets in the space. At the same time, there are still a lot of questions about AI models’ effectiveness, about where companies are going to find the training data they need to keep improving those models and about the ethics of things like creating an AI assistant with a voice that sounds suspiciously similar to Scarlett Johansson without her permission.
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