Aina, a Bengaluru- and San Francisco-based startup building human-computer interface devices, has raised $5.5 million in a funding round led by Redstart Labs (Info Edge India) and 360 ONE, with participation from MIXI Global Investments, Antler, and Blume Founders Fund. Individual investors in the round included Kunal Shah, Razorpay co-founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, and Scribd founder Tikhon Bernstam. TechCrunch

The company was founded by Apoorv Shankar, formerly VP of Hardware at smart ring maker Ultrahuman. Before Ultrahuman acquired his earlier startup LazyCo, Shankar had been building hardware interface devices there, including a ring that let users control other devices like a smartphone. Ultrahuman brought Shankar in-house through the acquisition; he left in 2025. His departure was motivated by curiosity about AI interfaces and frustration with devices like the Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin, which he found disappointing.

Aina was previously known as Project Mirage. The name "Aina" means "mirror" in Hindi.

The startup's first shipping product is Dune, a three-key, context-aware macro keyboard. Dune can control microphone and camera in meetings and run shortcuts or scripts based on the application the user is viewing. The context-awareness is the differentiator: the keys adapt their function to whatever app is in focus, turning a minimal physical surface into a flexible input layer.

Aina has two other devices in development. Radiance is a tabletop remote designed for video calls, featuring a volume dial and dedicated buttons for mic mute, camera toggle, AI notetaker activation, voice modulation, and joining meetings. Shift is a single-tap agentic button that connects to a phone and triggers an AI agent to execute a repeated task.

In early testing, Dune proved the most popular of the three, which led the company to prioritize it for first shipment.

The funding and product strategy point to a specific thesis: that the bottleneck in human-AI interaction is input, not output. The Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin both attempted to rethink the AI hardware form factor and both struggled commercially. Shankar's take, based on his decision to leave Ultrahuman over those disappointments, is that the problem is not ambient recording or wearable AI access but rather giving users a low-friction way to command and control AI agents during actual workflows.

The cap table tells its own story. Redstart Labs and 360 ONE leading the round brings institutional capital from India's venture ecosystem. The angel participants cut across fintech (Shah, Mathur, Kumar), consumer tech platforms (Bernstam), and early-stage infrastructure (Antler, Blume Founders Fund). That spread suggests the round drew founders and operators who see adjacent relevance in better AI input mechanisms rather than pure hardware bettors.

Shankar's trajectory gives the project credibility on the hardware side. LazyCo was already exploring minimal-input physical interfaces before the Ultrahuman acquisition. Dune's three-key design and Shift's single-button approach both extend that philosophy toward agentic AI workflows, where the task is not typing or navigation but triggering and directing automated processes.

The broader question is whether purpose-built input devices for AI agents find a durable market or become a transitional category. The meeting-control surface that Dune and Radiance address is concrete and recurring. Shift's single-tap agent trigger is more speculative; its value depends entirely on whether users develop reliable, repeatable agentic workflows worth dedicating a physical button to. At $5.5 million, Aina has enough runway to ship Dune at scale and test that thesis without overcommitting to all three form factors simultaneously.

The choice to ship Dune first, validated by early testing data, is a pragmatic sequencing decision. Meeting control is a problem with immediate, demonstrable utility. The agentic button is the more ambitious bet, and one that can wait until Dune establishes whether a market exists for specialized AI input hardware at all.