Humane is looking for a buyer for up to $1B

Just weeks after launching its much-hyped AI Pin wearable to a chorus of brutal reviews, Humane is already looking for an exit strategy.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the startup is actively seeking a buyer for its business, targeting a purchase price between $750 million and $1 billion.

From smartphone killer to fire sale

Humane was founded by former longtime Apple veterans Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. The company raised $230 million from heavyweight investors, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and reached an $850 million valuation in 2023.

The pitch was grand: clip a magnetic, screenless pin to your shirt, interact with multimodal AI models through voice and palm-projected laser displays, and break your phone addiction once and for all.

Then real reviewers got their hands on it. The $699 device, which requires a mandatory $24 monthly subscription, was universally panned for sluggish response times, unreliable software, awful battery life, and persistent overheating.

Humane promised firmware updates and even rolled out OpenAI’s GPT-4o last week to boost performance, but the reputational damage had already landed. To make matters stranger, early investor Sam Altman is reportedly teaming up with former Apple design chief Jony Ive on an entirely separate AI device.

Hunting for a giant

Trying to fetch up to a billion dollars for a battered brand is an uphill climb. The pool of potential acquirers is virtually limited to Big Tech players like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.

While all of these giants are throwing billions at generative AI, it is hard to see what Humane offers that they cannot build themselves. CosmOS and a handful of laser-projection patents may have intellectual property value, but taking on Humane at a markup looks like a very tough sell.

Why it matters

For regular buyers, this should be the final nail in the coffin for first-generation standalone AI gadgets. Between the AI Pin stumble and Rabbit r1 issues, nobody should be paying hundreds of dollars, let alone monthly fees, to beta-test half-baked hardware in public.

We think Humane made a fatal calculation by pitching the device as a smartphone killer. You cannot replace the visual fidelity, battery density, and muscle memory of a modern glass slab with a laggy voice prompt and a green laser beam on your palm.

With Apple and Google aggressively embedding frontier AI straight into their existing mobile operating systems, our smartphones are naturally becoming the ultimate AI assistants. Turns out the best home for personal AI was already in our pockets all along.