Ex‑Ultrahuman Exec Secures $5.5M to Build Aina, AI‑Era Hardware Interface Beyond Screens and Keyboards

• Ex-Ultrahuman Exec raises $5.5M for Aina, a new hardware interface for the age of AI beyond touchscreens and keyboards. 
• Aina was operating as an HCI Lab and recently launched Dune, a popular three-key context-aware keypad.

Design-led consumer hardware startup Aina has raised $5.5M to build a general-purpose interface for the age of AI and agents. The company launched Dune, a popular three-key context-aware keypad, earlier this year while continuing to build its flagship interface in stealth, one that redefines the way we interact with our devices, from everyday tasks on our phones to our computers.

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 entire workflows, but joining a meeting still takes four clicks. Booking a cab still means unlocking your phone, finding the app, typing a destination, and confirming. 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. Keyboards were last updated in the 1980s. Touchscreens were designed for the way we operated in 2007. This gap between software capability and hardware interfaces is why people are excited to learn 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's waitlist for the Pilot is now open.

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), Avnish Anand (Caratlane), Aditya Singh (All in Capital), KRS Jamwal (Tata), Shraeyansh Thakur (previously at PeakXV), Sarthak Misra and Medha Shankr (Bollywood Actor) among others.

The funding will be used to bring Aina's flagship interface to market and to scale the team across its San Francisco and Bengaluru 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.

Apoorv Shankar, Founder and CEO of Aina

 Apoorv Shankar, Founder and CEO of Aina, said, "Phones and computers today are still primarily designed for browsing. You put in the same effort whether the task is something you do daily or once a year, and when you are doing hundreds of tasks a day, every unnecessary step adds up to real cognitive load.

As intelligence becomes ubiquitous, AI assistants will get better at understanding context and agents will execute on our behalf. All we will have to do is say yes or no. The missing piece today is a context-aware layer paired with an easier way to capture that choice. We are building a general-purpose interface for this future, designed to capture human choice, 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 endeavour.”

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 the context of everything you're 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

Founded in May 2025 by Apoorv Shankar, former VP of Hardware at Ultrahuman, where he led the research, development, and manufacturing of the company's sleep-tracking rings.

For its first year, Aina operated in stealth as "Project Mirage", a Human-Computer Interaction lab exploring how people interact with AI in everyday life. The team ran experiments with hundreds of early adopters to understand real-world AI adoption and validate its thesis on what the future of interaction looks like.

One of these early experiments was Dune, a context-aware keypad for Mac, launched in April 2026.

The Bengaluru team works out of an electronics manufacturing unit, part of which has been converted into a design and prototyping studio. The setting reflects the company's approach: combining industrial capability, interaction design, and rapid experimentation to create new hardware for the AI era.

The waitlist for Aina’s Pilot is now open at aina.com