British smartphone and tech maker Nothing has announced a new Series C funding round at a $1.3 billion valuation. The company has raised $200 million to build an AI platform that "unifies hardware and software into a single intelligent system."
Founder and CEO Carl Pei wrote in a blog post that smartphones remain a key device in the age of artificial intelligence, but the market is lacking innovation. That's why the company plans to create a new operating system that will, in particular, become the basis for future devices.
Pei notes that new devices will soon appear for native AI work. The Nothing operating system will be used in smart glasses, humanoid robots, electric cars and everything else that will appear in the future, in addition to smartphones.
In its official statement, Nothing also announced that it will introduce a new device next year designed to work natively with artificial intelligence, but is not yet revealing details.
Artificial intelligence devices are no longer a novelty, but there is still no truly successful product on the market. Solutions such as the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1 have failed — users quickly lost interest in them, often returned purchases, and even former iPhone designer Jony Ive described them as unsuccessful products.
Despite the failures of its predecessors, Jony Ive and OpenAI's new startup is working on a device that should enable users to easily interact with artificial intelligence. However, there are difficulties here too — the company that created ChatGPT has already found itself at the center of a scandal over trademark infringement.