Humane AI Pin (2023-2025): the $230 million wearable that HP bought for parts

Where Humane came from

Imran Chaudhri spent more than two decades at Apple and was a senior designer on the iPhone, the iPad, and Apple Watch human-interface work. Bethany Bongiorno was a director of software engineering at Apple who led the launch of the original iPad and worked on iOS and macOS. They left Apple to co-found Humane in 2018 with the explicit thesis that the smartphone era was ending and that a new AI-native computing device could replace the phone as a primary interface.

The pitch attracted blue-chip venture money. Across multiple rounds from 2019 through 2023, Humane raised approximately $230 million from Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, Forerunner, Salesforce, Microsoft, LG, Qualcomm, and Sam Altman, among others. Pre-launch valuations were reported as high as $850 million. The company spent five years in stealth-to-semi-stealth development; the product itself was not publicly demoed in detail until late 2023.

The AI Pin product and launch

The AI Pin was unveiled at TED in April 2023 in a brief demo by Chaudhri, then formally launched on November 9, 2023. The device was a small square wearable that clipped to clothing via a magnetic battery booster. It had no screen; instead, a laser projector cast a low-resolution monochrome interface onto the user’s palm. Interaction was primarily voice and gesture. The device used a custom AI “operating system” called CosmOS that brokered queries to large language models (initially OpenAI) and other services. Pricing was $699 for the device plus $24 per month for the always-on cellular and AI-services subscription.

First customer shipments began April 11, 2024. The first wave of long-form reviews arrived within days. The consensus was severe: the device was slow, the laser projection was hard to read in normal light, voice recognition was unreliable, battery life was poor, the device ran hot, and the core promise — that AI could substitute for a phone-screen interface for everyday tasks — was not delivered.

The reception and the unraveling

Marques Brownlee’s YouTube review on April 14, 2024 was titled “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… For Now.” The Verge, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal published similarly harsh reviews. Within weeks the story shifted from product reception to operational survival. The Verge reported in August 2024, citing internal documents, that daily returns were exceeding daily sales and that total returns had pushed the install base below 8,000 units. Humane publicly disputed some specific figures but did not produce countervailing unit-sales data.

In June 2024 the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission warned consumers to stop using the AI Pin’s charging case because of a lithium-ion battery fire hazard, and Humane offered replacement cases. The company explored sale paths through summer 2024 with reported asking prices in the $750 million to $1 billion range — figures the press treated as wishful given the underlying commercial trajectory.

The HP transaction

On February 18, 2025, HP announced that it had acquired Humane’s assets, including the CosmOS platform, most of the engineering team, and the intellectual property, for approximately $116 million. The AI Pin device itself was discontinued. HP stated that the team would be incorporated into a new AI-platform organization (later associated with HP’s IQ initiative) building AI capabilities for HP’s broader hardware portfolio. Customers who had purchased an AI Pin received limited support windows; cellular service for the devices was wound down within months.

On the financial side, an approximately $230 million-funded company sold for approximately $116 million in asset value is a roughly 50 percent recovery against gross funding, before counting the unfunded customer-service liabilities and refunds. For the investor stack, this was a substantial loss against entry prices; for HP, it was a relatively cheap way to acquire an Apple-trained design and AI-systems team plus the CosmOS codebase.

How RGM thinks about hardware-first AI product strategy

When clients ask about launching new AI-native devices, the AI Pin case is the most recent and most clearly-documented warning. Three structural mistakes compound in the story. First, the product was launched before the underlying AI models could reliably support the use cases the device was sold against — the latency and accuracy of voice-to-action workflows in 2024 were not where they needed to be for a phone-replacement device. Second, the form-factor choices (laser projection, no screen) added cost and friction without delivering capability the smartphone could not. Third, the price point and subscription combined meant the device had to be genuinely better than a smartphone-plus-app combination, which it was not.

The pattern is not that AI-native hardware cannot work — Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, Apple Watch, and various ambient-computing pilots have found product-market fit in narrower use cases. The pattern is that the gap between “impressive demo” and “reliable daily-use product” is much larger for AI-native hardware than for software, and that hardware launch economics — supply chain commits, retail SKUs, regulatory approvals — do not allow for the iterative refinement that AI software typically gets. We tell clients to insist on a stable, narrow first use case where the AI reliably outperforms the existing alternative, rather than betting on a category-replacement narrative.

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