Humane, a mysterious startup founded by ex-Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, announced earlier this week that it raised $100 million in a recent Series C funding round. This means that the startup has now raised a total of $230 million in funding despite the fact that they don’t have a publicly-offered product or customers.
Since being founded five years ago, Humane has been famously tight-lipped about what they actually do. They say that they are “building the first AI hardware and software platform” that will come in 2023 but don’t offer much detail past that.
Being secretive didn’t prove problematic for the company to attract investors, including some notable corporations like LG, Microsoft, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Qualcomm Ventures, and Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of artificial intelligence laboratory OpenAI. Humane also built a team of 200 employees, with almost half of them having some ties with Apple.
There are many speculations about what it will Humane actually offer to the public. The most educated guesses have described some kind of a “wearable device” that will use AI to collect data and perform activities via laser projections and hand gestures.
In a recent chat with Fortune’s Jessica Matthews, co-founders Chaudhri and Bongiorno said that Human is building a “mobile compute device” alongside a “new software distribution platform” but didn’t offer many details past that. However, the duo did confirm that their product will be launched in the summer of 2023.