Era Computer Raises $11M to Build the Software Layer for AI-Powered Gadgets (April 2026)

New York–based startup Era on April 23, 2026 announced it has raised a total of $11 million to build a software platform for AI-powered hardware — a $9 million seed round led by Abstract Ventures and BoxGroup, on top of a previously unannounced $2 million pre-seed from Topology Ventures and Betaworks. The company says its goal is not to build another AI gadget itself, but to ship the orchestration layer every other AI-gadget startup keeps re-implementing from scratch.

What Happened

Era exited stealth on April 23 with a TechCrunch announcement and a public website at era.world. The seed round, led by Abstract Ventures and BoxGroup, also drew participation from Collaborative Fund and Mozilla Ventures. Angel investors include Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, original iPhone keyboard creator Ken Kocienda, OAS founder Tony Wang, former Rabbit CPO ShaoBo Z, and Poetry Camera creator Kelin Zhang.

The company is led by CEO Liz Dorman, who previously worked on AI orchestration at Humane and stayed through HP's acquisition; CTO Alex Ollman, who built enterprise agent frameworks at HP; and CPO Megan Gole, who came from Sutter Hill Ventures, where she worked on the io project from Jony Ive and Sam Altman before joining Era.

Key Details

• $9M seed + $2M pre-seed = $11M total raised — seed led by Abstract Ventures and BoxGroup; pre-seed led by Topology Ventures and Betaworks.
• 130+ LLMs from 14+ providers are exposed through Era's platform, letting device makers swap models per task without writing custom adapters.
• Multimodal agent runtime built for hardware: voice generation, contextual reasoning, and real-time data interpretation embedded into devices like wearables, audio products, and standalone gadgets.
• Privacy-preserving by design — Era says the platform will let end users choose their own memory and model providers as the AI-gadget category matures.
• Public showcase: Earlier in April, Era shipped a developer kit to 30 artists in New York. Their built objects — from a stock-watching pseudo-phone to a France-fact souvenir to an air-quality monitor — were exhibited at Era's Primavera gallery as a stress test for the SDK.
• Marquee operator angels — the cap table notably leans on people who have shipped consumer hardware: Kocienda (iPhone), Fake (Flickr), and ShaoBo Z (Rabbit) are all on the angel list.

What Developers and Users Are Saying

The reception across X and Hacker News has been cautiously curious rather than euphoric. Threads framed Era as the first credible answer to a question repeated through every Humane, Rabbit, and Friend launch: who builds the underlying "OS" layer for embedded AI hardware? Several Hacker News commenters argued that the AI-gadget category itself is still unproven, citing Humane's collapse and Rabbit's reception, and questioned whether a horizontal platform can find paying hardware customers before the category coalesces. Others pointed to Era's hires from Humane, HP, and the Jony Ive / Sam Altman io project as evidence that the team has unusual credibility for the space.

Designers and indie hardware makers on X reacted more positively to the Primavera gallery showcase, which framed Era's pitch in concrete artifacts rather than slideware. Mozilla Ventures' participation in the round drew separate attention from privacy-focused developers, who read it as a signal that user-controlled memory and model choice are part of the roadmap rather than a marketing line.

What This Means for Developers

If you are building an AI-native consumer device — a wearable, a smart speaker, an ambient assistant — Era's pitch is that you no longer need to write your own model router, voice pipeline, agent runtime, and privacy layer from scratch. The platform handles model selection across 130+ LLMs, multimodal inputs, voice generation, and orchestration so that hardware teams can focus on the physical product. The trade-off is the usual one for early-stage platforms: vendor lock-in risk, limited public documentation, and a small reference-customer base. Hardware projects further along than the prototype stage will want to wait for SDK maturity and pricing transparency before committing.

For app developers and AI agent builders, Era's positioning also signals where the broader stack is heading: away from screen-and-app paradigms and toward intelligence embedded in physical objects. Expect adjacent tooling — agent memory services, on-device inference runtimes, hardware-friendly model gateways — to follow this thesis.

What's Next

Era has not yet published public pricing or general-availability timelines. The company says it will continue distributing developer kits and onboarding hardware partners through invite, with broader access expected later in 2026. Watch era.world and CEO Liz Dorman's LinkedIn for SDK release notes and the next round of partner gadgets.

Sources

• TechCrunch — Era raises $11M to build a software platform for AI gadgets — the original April 23 announcement with founder backgrounds and investor list.
• Era — official site — launch page, Primavera gallery, and team manifesto.
• Pulse 2.0 — confirms 130+ LLMs across 14+ providers and angel-investor list.
• Tech Funding News — independent coverage with deal mechanics.
• Founders Today — secondary-source breakdown of the round and roadmap.
• Liz Dorman on LinkedIn — founder's launch-day post.