Friend is a $99 AI necklace designed just to keep you company

AI wearables have had a brutally rough year. Between Humane's burning pins and Rabbit's chaotic gadget rollout, the promise of replacing your smartphone has mostly turned into a graveyard of refund requests.

Avi Schiffmann is pitching a radically different bet: AI shouldn't do your chores, it should just be your friend. The Harvard dropout and viral COVID tracking site creator just revealed Friend, a screenless, neck-worn AI pendant designed purely to combat loneliness.

The hardware is surprisingly stripped down. Priced at $99 with preorders shipping in January 2025, the white device connects via Bluetooth to your phone. It has a single walkie-talkie button. You press it to talk, and it replies by sending a text to your phone. Because it is always listening, it can also ping you out of nowhere, like dropping a quick "good luck" text right before a job interview.

Schiffmann recently raised $2.5 million at a $50 million valuation from prominent tech figures, including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Solana founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, and Google senior product manager Logan Kilpatrick.

Interestingly, Schiffmann originally tried the productivity playbook himself. Last year he raised about $100,000 in preorders for Tab, a $600 pendant aimed at transcribing meetings. He scrapped it entirely, offered refunds, and pivoted to pure emotional support. Schiffmann argues that products like Character AI and Replika already proved that people just want to talk about their day, but having physical hardware creates a genuine emotional anchor. On the privacy front, the company claims recordings are not stored and chats can be deleted at any time.

Why it matters

Friend might actually be the most realistic consumer AI hardware we have seen all year, precisely because it stops pretending to be a supercomputer.

By dropping the price to $99 and narrowing the scope down to an "emotional toy," Schiffmann sidesteps the brutal expectation trap that destroyed Humane and Rabbit. Users do not expect perfection from an emotional companion the way they do from an assistant booking their flights. If you want a zero-friction sounding board on your chest, this is an accessible novelty.

However, we think the hurdle is retention. Wearing an always-on microphone around your neck is a big psychological ask, even with no-storage pledges. Once the novelty of getting supportive push notifications wears off, Schiffmann will have to prove that a physical token actually beats a free app already sitting in your pocket.