Aina, a startup based in Bengaluru, India and San Francisco, has raised $5.5 million from investors to build physical devices that help people control AI tools more easily. The funding round was led by Redstart Labs (part of Info Edge India) and 360 ONE, with additional backing from MIXI Global Investments, Antler, and Blume Founders Fund. Individual investors included Kunal Shah, Razorpay co-founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, and Scribd founder Tikhon Bernstam. TechCrunch

The company was founded by Apoorv Shankar, who used to be VP of Hardware at Ultrahuman, a company that makes smart rings. Before that, he ran a startup called LazyCo, which Ultrahuman bought. At LazyCo, Shankar had been building small physical devices that let you control other devices, like a ring that could control your phone. He left Ultrahuman in 2025 because he was curious about how people interact with AI and because he was frustrated with AI gadgets like the Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin, which he found disappointing.

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

The startup's first product available for purchase is Dune, a small keyboard with just three keys. The trick is that the keys are context-aware, meaning they change what they do depending on which app you're using. If you're in a video call, the keys can mute your mic or turn off your camera. If you're in another app, they can run shortcuts or scripts. It's like having a small physical remote that adapts to whatever you're doing on screen.

Aina has two other devices in the works. Radiance is a tabletop remote for video calls, with a volume dial and buttons for muting your mic, toggling your camera, turning on an AI notetaker, changing your voice, and joining meetings. Shift is a single button that connects to your phone and, when tapped, tells an AI agent to carry out a task you've set up in advance.

In early testing, Dune was the most popular of the three, so the company decided to ship it first.

The idea behind all of this is that the hardest part of using AI is not getting answers back, it's telling the AI what you want it to do. The Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin both tried to create new kinds of AI hardware, and both struggled to sell well. Shankar's view is that the real problem is not wearing an AI device or having it record you, but giving people a simple, fast way to give commands to AI tools while they're actually working.

The list of investors tells its own story. Redstart Labs and 360 ONE bringing institutional money connects the company to India's venture funding world. The individual investors come from different areas: fintech (Shah, Mathur, Kumar), consumer technology (Bernstam), and early-stage startup investing (Antler, Blume Founders Fund). That mix suggests these investors are interested in better ways to interact with AI, not just in hardware for its own sake.

Shankar's background lends credibility on the hardware side. His earlier company LazyCo was already exploring the idea of using very few buttons to control devices. Dune's three-key design and Shift's single-button idea both build on that same approach, but aimed at AI tasks, where the goal is not typing or moving a cursor but triggering automated actions.

The broader question is whether devices built specifically for controlling AI will catch on permanently or turn out to be a short-lived trend. The meeting-control features that Dune and Radiance offer are practical and solve an everyday problem. Shift's single button is more of a gamble; it only makes sense if people develop reliable, repeated AI tasks that are worth dedicating a physical button to. With $5.5 million, Aina has enough money to produce Dune at scale and find out whether this idea works, without betting everything on all three devices at once.

Shipping Dune first was a practical choice, backed by early testing. Controlling meetings is a problem people deal with every day. The single-tap AI button is the bigger, riskier idea, and it can wait until Dune shows whether there's a market for this kind of specialized AI hardware at all.