Design-focused consumer hardware startup Aina has raised $5.5 million to develop a general-purpose interface for the AI era. Earlier this year, the company launched Dune, a three-key context-aware keypad, while continuing to build its flagship interface in stealth, aiming to reshape how people interact with devices ranging from smartphones to personal computers.
The seed funding round was led by Redstart Labs (Infoedge, India) and 360 One Asset. Other investors included MIXI Global Investments, Antler, Blume Founders Fund and angels including Kunal Shah (WhatsApp/Cred), Tikhon Bernstam (Scribd), Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar (Razorpay) and 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 was founded by Apoorv Shankar, former vice president (VP) of Hardware at Ultrahuman, a health-tech company . Incorporated in May 2025, the company has been operating as a Human-Computer Interaction lab under the name “Project Mirage”.
“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,” said Apoorv Shankar, founder and CEO of Aina. “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) said, “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.”
According to the company, AI is changing how people perform everyday tasks. 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.
According to Aina, 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 programme is now open.
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.
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.
 "AI hardware startup Aina raises $5.5 mn to build next-generation interface")
