Consumer hardware company Aina has announced a $5.5M seed round to build a general purpose interface for the age of AI beyond phone touchscreens and keyboards. Aina was operating as an HCI Lab for the last few months and is the company behind Dune, a popular three-key context-aware keypad, launched earlier this year. 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – July 16, 2026;  AI is changing the way people do everything, a single prompt can now generate an entire movie. Yet the everyday experience hasn’t caught up. AI notetakers automate our entire notetaking process, but joining a meeting still takes four clicks through unnecessary windows. Booking a cab still means unlocking your phone, finding the app, typing a destination, and confirming, just to get a ride.

The problem is the dated hardware layer. Software and AI have evolved rapidly, but the interfaces humans use to interact with them haven’t kept pace. For input on computers, we still rely on keyboards last updated in the 1980s. For simpler everyday tasks, we still pull out our phones, unlock the screen, open an app, browse, and finally complete the task, all on touchscreens designed for the way we operated in 2007. This gap between software capability and hardware interfaces is why people are always excited to learn about how AI can change their lives, but end up feeling overwhelmed and fail to adopt new tools fast enough.

An upgrade is needed in the way people interact with their daily apps and services. Aina has raised $5.5M to build a general-purpose interface designed for the age of AI and agents. Today, Aina is opening the waitlist for a Pilot of the interface being built in stealth.

The seed funding round was led by Redstart Labs (Infoedge, India) and 360 ONE Asset, with participation from MIXI Global Investments, Antler, Blume Founders Fund and angels including Kunal Shah (WhatsApp/Cred), Tikhon Bernstam (Scribd), Harshil and Shashank (Razorpay), Vaibhav Domkundwar (Better Capital) among others. The funding will be used to bring Aina’s flagship interface, which the team has been building in stealth, to market and to scale the team across its San Francisco and Bangalore offices.

Aina is founded by Apoorv Shankar, former VP of Hardware at Ultrahuman, the sleep tracking ring company. Incorporated in May 2025, the company has been operating as a Human-Computer Interaction lab under the name “Project Mirage”.

The company showcased three experimental AI interfaces at CES 2026, each an iteration in its broader research into HCI across different domains, targeting common applications people use daily: online meetings, booking cabs, ordering food.

From those experiments, the company announced Dune in April, a context-aware keypad for Mac that automatically adapts its three keys to whichever application is in the foreground. The team has since shipped hundreds of Dune keypads to early adopters, working closely with power users to learn from their feedback and daily workflows, validate the company’s thesis, and understand real-world AI adoption. While each experimental interface targeted specific applications people interact with daily, primarily for work, the company has been building something larger in stealth: a general-purpose interface designed for the age of AI that redefines the way we do everything, from everyday tasks on our phones to our computers.

Apoorv Shankar, Founder and CEO of Aina says “Phones and computers today are still primarily designed for Browsing. You think about the task, manually input what’s needed, and put in the same effort whether it’s something done daily or once a year. These interfaces put everything in front of you and let you figure out what you need. When you’re doing hundreds of tasks a day, every unnecessary decision, every extra step, every moment spent navigating instead of acting adds up to real cognitive load across a working day.

As intelligence gets commoditized, AI assistants will get better at understanding context and knowing what you need, and agents will execute on your behalf. We will simply receive prompts for every day-to-day task, and all we will have to do is say yes or no. The missing piece today is this context-aware layer paired with an easier way to capture human choice. We are building a general-purpose interface for this future, designed to capture human approval, effortlessly.”

Vibhore Sharma, Redstart Labs(Infoedge) commented: “We inherited the assumption that computers are tools – you instruct, they execute. AI is quietly dissolving that line. One of the key questions that matter is how the relationship changes when software starts to understand context and the interface disappears. That’s where new categories like Aina are born and where part of the future is hiding. We are excited to back the team in this endeavor.”

Abhishek Nag, Head of Venture Capital, 360 ONE Asset, added: “Every leap in computing has demanded a new hardware interface, from punch cards to the GUI to the smartphone. As AI agents become the primary way for people to interact with computers, the world once again needs a new generation of interfaces built for how we’ll actually compute. Apoorv and the team have shown they can design and manufacture revolutionary consumer hardware from India for the world, and we’re proud to co-lead their seed round as they build it.”

Every generation of computing has produced a new interface. Each one won by asking less of the person using it. Aina believes the next one asks least of all. In a world where AI has context of everything you are doing, the only thing left for humans is to choose. Aina is building the most effortless and natural way to capture that choice, so in the age of AI, we can spend our time on things that actually require human intelligence and effort.

About Aina
Aina is a design-led consumer hardware company building a general-purpose AI interface beyond phone touchscreens and keyboards. Founded in May 2025 by the former VP of Hardware at Ultrahuman, the company has been operating as a Human-Computer Interaction lab under the name “Project Mirage”, building this interface in stealth while running experiments in HCI with hundreds of early adopters to understand real-world AI adoption and validate their thesis on what the future of interaction looks like. One of these experiments was Dune, a context-aware keypad for Mac that launched in April.

The company has a 35-person team across San Francisco and Bangalore, and the waitlist for their new AI interface is open at aina.com.

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