Era, a company has raised $11 million to develop the intelligence infrastructure for future AI gadgets, reports Tech Crunch. The funding round included a $9 million seed investment led by Abstract Ventures and BoxGroup, with Collaborative Fund and Mozilla Ventures also participating.
An additional $2 million in pre-seed funding came from Topology Ventures and Betaworks. Angel investors include Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, Ken Kocienda, who created the iPhone keyboard, and ShaoBo Z, former CPO at Rabbit.
Liz Dorman, Alex Ollman, and Megan Gole founded Era in Ney York in 2025 to build the software infrastructure that allows others to create them. It manages voice customisation, multimodal inputs, and real-time decision-making, solving complex infrastructure challenges so hardware makers do not have to handle them alone.
The platform offers access to over 130 large language models from more than 14 providers and supports different types of devices, such as glasses, jewelry, and home speakers.
Its direct competitors include Sandbar and Taya that also focus on AI hardware infrastructure. The bigger challenge comes from large companies like Google or Apple. If they create leading embedded AI layers in their own ecosystems, it will be harder for independent infrastructure providers like Era to compete.
Era plans to open its platform to the open source and maker community following its artist showcase in New York earlier this month, where developers built experimental devices including an air quality monitor and a stock tracker.
