Aina lands $5.5M to build AI agent controls

A new startup called Aina has raised $5.5 million to build hardware for controlling AI agents, not simply capturing conversations or ambient context. The Bengaluru- and San Francisco-based company said the round was led by Redstart Labs (Infoedge, India) and 360 ONE, with participation from MIXI Global Investments, Antler, and Blume Founders Fund.

The round also included individual investors such as newly appointed WhatsApp head Kunal Shah, Razorpay co-founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, and Scribd founder Tikhon Bernstam.

Aina, previously known as Project Mirage, was founded by Apoorv Shankar, formerly VP of Hardware at Ultrahuman. Before that, Shankar ran LazyCo, a hardware interface design startup that built gadgets including a ring for controlling devices such as smartphones. Ultrahuman later acquired LazyCo.

“I left Ultrahuman last year because I was just super curious about the space of AI interfaces.” “Devices like Rabbit and Humane Pin had launched, and I had my own disappointments with them. However, I was just excited that we are seeing interfaces being a thing now. And as an engineer turned product designer, this was the hottest thing I could imagine myself building.”

Aina’s first product is Dune, a three-key, context-aware macro keyboard designed to control a meeting’s mic and camera, and run shortcuts or scripts based on the app a user is viewing.

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The company also developed two other devices:

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• Radiance: a tabletop remote for video calls with a dial for volume and buttons for mic, camera, AI notetaker, voice modulation, and joining a meeting
• Shift: a single-tap “agentic” button that connects to a phone and triggers an AI agent to perform a repeated task

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Dune will ship first

Aina said early testing showed Dune was the most popular of the three devices, and that many of the other features could be folded into the keypad. That feedback pushed the company to ship Dune first while it studies which workflows people actually want to automate.

Shankar said Aina’s next product is already in the works, with testing for a small group of select users planned in the coming weeks. He did not share details, but said it will not be an always-listening context-capture device like a ring or meeting recorder.

“I think you have enough context, you have in your phone and your laptop all the time, and we haven’t even started using that well. We are building an action-oriented device that will use the context to help you control and trigger workflows.”

Aina is entering a crowded field. TechCrunch points to products such as the Sandbar ring, Plaud’s AI pin and desktop notetaker, Pocket’s pucks, Bee, Friend, Meta Ray-Bans, and Even Realities glasses. On the agent-control side, OpenAI this week released a custom keypad for Codex with Work Louder, while Rabbit R1 and reported OpenAI smart speaker plans show how unsettled the form factor still is. Qualcomm has also said it is experimenting with more than 40 devices for interacting with AI.