Humane, the ambitious start-up behind the PIN AI device that aimed to replace smartphones one day, agreed to sell parts of his HP activity for $ 116 million, said the companies Tuesday.
HP said he planned to acquire Humane’s “artificial intelligence capacity”, including his software platform, intellectual property, patents and some employees. The OI pin will be closed, Humane said in a message to customers.
The agreement makes up a fall for the high-level start-up, which has heavily promoted the $ 699 pivot with ads, a TED speech and the Paris fashion week with supermodel. Humane has collected $ 240 million in funding from high -profile investors, including Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and its Openii counterpart, Sam Altman, evaluating the company at $ 850 million before publishing a product.
Humane was created by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, founders of husband and wife who previously worked in Apple. The couple imagined a wearable device that people hooked their clothes and interact with the use of voice commands and a laser display projected on their hand. The idea was to reduce the time spent to fix the screens of smartphones.
But the HIG pivot, which started sending customers last spring, was a flop.
The auditors criticized the product, with the artificial intelligence software that often gave wrong answers or taking a lot of time to answer, while the pivot batteries sometimes overheated. Humane had hoped to sell 100,000 pins in his first year, but only obtained about 10,000 orders. At some point, the company told customers to stop using their charging cases due to the risk of fire.
Last year, Humane took on an investment bank to sell himself, also looking for new funding. The start-up has sought a sales price of over $ 1 billion.
Tuesday, a letter published on the Humane website said that the PINs would no longer work at the end of this month and that customer data would be eliminated. “Our company priorities have moved,” said the letter.
HP, who sells about 53 million PCs per year, said he wanted to add artificial intelligence to his laptops to make them more useful. Last year, HP worked with Microsoft to develop a computer line to called Copilot+ PCS.
In his announcement, HP said he would use Humane technology to become a “company led by experience”. Humane workers will be part of a new innovation laboratory called HP Qi, which will focus on the “construction of an intelligent ecosystem through the products and services of HP”. Chaudhri and Mrs. Bongiorno will join the company, as well as most of the start-up employees, said an HP spokesperson.
“We are investing and innovating aggressively in new skills and software based on artificial intelligence,” said Enrique Lores, president and CEO of HP, during a call with analysts in November. “We will focus on the supply of a technology fueled by cutting -edge artificial intelligence.”