HumaneAI pin maker selling itself for $1B | Hacker News Reader

HumaneAI pin maker selling itself for $1B

gizmodo.com

26 pointsalangibson46 comments

It's really hard to imagine they have assets worth remotely close to $1B. They don't even have a brand to sell after their terrible launch.

The value of this company is cash in the bank minus debts. So probably negative.

what about possible tax benefits? what about using questionable accounting, getting the money then stalling in court with expensive lawyers? with AI, all things are becoming possible it seems

Good point. Could be a good private equity target. Buy it, load it up with debt, pay yourself out, then declare bankruptcy.

Yes, it seems delusional for an OpenAI wrapper with a dedicated device.

Freaking Instagram sold for $1B in the before times.

If they get even remotely close to $1B, I'm going to rage quit my job and go shopping for black turtleneck shirts. Because that's basically all you need these days.

They might get $1B on paper, but I’d be shocked if anyone is cashing out anywhere near that valuation.

But the LLM they asked cited a $1B valuation.

The valuation and money raised by Humane are actually very similar to Essential Products. (Though I'd guess Humane has burned more of their cash than Essential ever did.)

I'd contend that the Essential Phone was a far better product than the AI Pin, and Essential ended up shutting down and selling the remaining scraps to Nothing for (presumably) pennies.

Coffezilla made a video on this company and their CEO. It makes total sense in that context. (That they're trying to make a quick exit before further things come to light)

https://youtu.be/NPOHf20slZg?si=bYBswCjCGY0lFsUK

That's a different company (Rabbit Inc), not Humane Inc

1 Billion for what? Do they have actually products? A revenue? What exactly has this much worth at a company which seems to be burned and roasted by everyone since the first moment they came public?

If they had charged $3000 per pin but actually made it work then they could make a case for brand value.

> The company was previously valued at $850 million (before the launch of the AI Pin)

Isn't the valuation geared towards making investors whole instead of the actual value of a company? I thought this was standard in the VC world.

Valuation is essentially what the last investors are willing to pay for a 'share' of the company multiplied by total shares.

They may be throwing a hail mary and trying to get it all back from sucker tho.

Really interesting co-founder. Claims he made the iPhone? (https://x.com/imranchaudhri) and has a bunch of patents (http://imranchaudhri.com/) apparently made on behalf of Apple along with his colleuges covering things like widgets (https://patents.google.com/patent/US7752556)

Success has many fathers.

As I said before, [0] This company is no. where. near. worth $1BN. Even the Rabbit R1 (another solution in search of a problem) out sold them.

At this point, Humane should be 90% marked down if they decide to sell and once they do, it will be the equivalent of Theranos but for AI.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40146901

I received one of these as a gift from someone. I was obviously skeptical but started using it and there's definitely a few areas where it REALLY excels at. The team tried to do waaaaay too much here... If they had more time or less ambition I think this could have really been something neat. My fingers are crossed that like Apple thinks so as well...

I wish they had just made a Bluetooth accessory to an app. But you can't get a $800M validation with a $99, easily cloneable accessory.

100% it should be an accessory. It's a bit weird to carry another phone around - it's gonna be a WHILE before this replaces them, if it ever does. But all the hardware is great and having that all in that pin location is pretty nice as well.

Can you explain what it does or what you are using it for? I looked on the homepage (https://humane.com/) but couldn't figure it out.

It's a wearable like a watch, whose main purpose is to be a digital assistant using server-side AI. It has its own plan so it's always connected. The things I've liked that you can do with it are like:

* Take a photo/video with a couple taps

* Have it "see" the area in front of you and give you insight - e.g. "Look at the desk in front of me, find all the items on it and put it into a note titled 'My Messy Desk'"

* Find information for you and do stuff with it - get me the number for X and dial it. Or get me the number for X and add it to a contact labeled Y

* Play me classic rock songs that feature "sunshine" as the main theme

* Add to my X log, at the current date and time that Y occurred

* Find me 25 songs that match X and put them into a note in X order

* Find me places where I can buy soda at that are open at the moment nearby

* Review my X log, remove any entries where Y occurred and replace them with Z

* How long is the second movie of the one about the desert, and what's it named?

Imagine if your digital assistant didn't suck, but then scale back your ambitions a bit because it's early lol. It's neat. Could you replicate it in order ways that aren't a wearable? Sure. But it's a decent assistant, nice always-accessible camera, speaker for music, wearable for texts/calls/whatever and I like the location it sits at.

Since it's so friction-less, it's easier to be curious IMO.

So it's a gpt-4 device with a camera? It's like siri plugged to gpt-4. I can see the attraction (though would still prefer my phone) but then then don't have the "AI" anymore than anyone else in this field.

the market for AI one-offs died before it even got started.

This sale is going to turn out to be some sort of scam

There's a new Coffeezilla video out claiming Rabbit is based on an old crypto scam. So at least 50% of this category is already a scam.

When the phone apps come out, these "you have to have a separate device" arguments will simply die out.

There's no real argument here. Your phone is a perfectly good clock, but the watch wearables are neat too. Same with these types of devices.

That valuation is nuts. Worth 200M tops and I'm being generous.

How did you arrive at 200M? Sounds generous.

AI hype tax.

In reality 50M would still be generous.

50M as a generous acqui-hire maybe.

I am also selling myself for $1B

The thing that turned me off most about humane was what I perceived as arrogance from the cofounder in the Ted talk, passing off a hacked together experience as if it was a functioning product but pretending it was something more. The audacity!

…And I have to say, this seems pretty on-brand. You do you, Humane.

Of course they are. Good luck with that.

Don't think they should be selling... just talk to users, and keep iterating on it. It'll be good, it has potential, the design is good.

They've been working on this thing since 2018. They'd be way better off just moving on to a better idea.

Being too early is functionally identical to being wrong.

AI hardware has to be an incredibly tough space to be in. Things are moving at such a rapid pace that by the time you launch, you’re already out of date.

Is AI hardware moving at all? Seems like a DOA idea in a world where smartphones exist.

I agree, it's a backwards move. Smartphones already absorbed the functionality of discrete devices like cameras, music players, etc. Why anyone would want to go back to carrying more stuff is beyond me.

I just don't understand the value of this pin over a smart phone.

There isn't any. It could maybe have been interesting as a Bluetooth speaker, mic and camera accessory tho.

What kind of potential are you seeing besides the cool tech factor? They have delivered on none of their feature promises. Is it the mysterious AI factor that leads you to believe that they will magically turn around a non-working product?

What's your reasoning behind saying "the design is good"? Everything thing I've seen says it's heavy, hot, slow, has an unusable menu system.

Well functionally it might suck a bit, but theoretically the idea of a laser is interesting, the design team in general is pretty good, I'm talking about aesthetics only here. Their device is beautiful. The team has an Apple flair certainly. I know I've seen the demos and it is surprising how slow and wrong it can be, etc. etc. But it's v1. The only good counter is they had a shit load of VC money, that's true. But still, I just don't think people should be quick to throw it in the bin. There's a baby in the bathwater, and one can't help but think if it only had a chance what could it have become.

I expect that isn't possible with the constraints of venture capital.

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