Humane, the ambitious start-up behind the Ai Pin device that aimed to one day replace smartphones, agreed to sell parts of its business to HP for $116 million, the companies said on Tuesday.
HP said it planned to buy Humane’s “A.I. capabilities,” including its software platform, intellectual property, patents and some employees. The Ai Pin will be shut down, Humane said in a message to customers.
The deal caps a downfall for the high-flying start-up, which had heavily promoted the $699 pin with ads, a TED Talk and at Paris Fashion Week with supermodels. Humane had raised $240 million in funding from high-profile investors, including Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, and his counterpart at OpenAI, Sam Altman, valuing the company at $850 million before it released a product.
Humane was created by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, husband-and-wife founders who previously worked at Apple. The pair envisioned a wearable device that people would clip to their clothes and interact with using voice commands and a laser display projected onto their hand. The idea was to cut down on time spent staring at smartphone screens.
But the Ai Pin, which began shipping to customers last spring, was a flop.
Reviewers criticized the product, with the A.I. software often giving wrong answers or taking a long time to respond, while the pin’s batteries sometimes overheated. Humane had hoped to sell 100,000 pins in its first year but only got around 10,000 orders. At one point, the company told customers to stop using their charging cases because of the fire risk.
Last year, Humane hired an investment bank to sell itself, while also seeking new funding. The start-up sought a sale price of more than $1 billion.
On Tuesday, Humane posted a letter to customers on the company’s website which said that the pins would no longer work at the end of this month and that customer data would be deleted. “Our business priorities have shifted,” the letter said.
HP, which sells an estimated 53 million PCs a year, has said it wants to add A.I. capabilities to its laptops to make them more useful. Last year, HP worked with Microsoft to develop a line of A.I. computers called Copilot+ PCs.
In its announcement, HP said that it would use Humane’s technology to become a more “experience-led company.” Humane’s workers will be part of a new innovation lab called HP IQ that will focus on “building an intelligent ecosystem across HP’s products and services.” Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno will join the company, as will the majority of the start-up’s employees, a HP spokeswoman said.
“We are investing and innovating aggressively in new A.I.-powered capabilities and software,” said Enrique Lores, president and chief executive of HP, during a call with analysts in November. “We will focus on delivering a cutting-edge A.I.-powered tech.”
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