Deep Tech Startup Aina Raises $5.5M in Seed Funding

The round also saw participation from MIXI Global Investments, Antler, Blume Founders Fund and angels including Kunal Shah, Tikhon Bernstam, Harshil Mathur, Shashank Kumar, and Vaibhav Domkundwar, among others.

The company will use the funding to launch its flagship product and expand its team across its San Francisco and Bangalore offices.

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The company introduced Dune in April, a smart keypad for Mac that automatically changes its three keys based on the app you're using. Since then, it has shipped hundreds of Dune keypads to early users and worked closely with them to improve the product and better understand how people use AI in their daily work.

While Dune focuses on specific work applications, the company has also been quietly building a much bigger product. Its goal is to create a general-purpose AI interface that changes how people interact with their phones and computers for everyday tasks.

Every generation of computing has introduced a new way for people to interact with technology, making it simpler each time. Aina believes the next generation will be even easier, with AI understanding what you're doing so you only need to make the final choice.

The company is building a simple and natural AI interface that lets people spend less time on routine tasks and more time on work that truly needs human creativity and judgment.

Apoorv Shankar, Founder and CEO of Aina, says, "Phones and computers today are still primarily designed for browsing. You think about the task, manually input what's needed, and put in the same effort whether it's something done daily or once a year. These interfaces put everything in front of you and let you figure out what you need.

Abhishek Nag, Head of Venture Capital, 360 ONE Asset, added: "Every leap in computing has demanded a new hardware interface, from punch cards to the GUI to the smartphone. As AI agents become the primary way for people to interact with computers, the world once again needs a new generation of interfaces built for how we'll actually compute.

Vibhore Sharma, Redstart Labs(Infoedge), commented: “We inherited the assumption that computers are tools - you instruct, they execute. AI is quietly dissolving that line. One of the key questions that matters is how the relationship changes when software starts to understand context and the interface disappears. That's where new categories like Aina are born and where part of the future is hiding. We are excited to back the team in this endeavor.”

About Aina

Founded in 2025 by Apoorv Shankar, Aina began as a human-computer interaction (HCI) research lab called Project Mirage. The company spent its early days quietly testing new ideas with hundreds of users to understand how people use AI and what the future of human-computer interaction could look like. Today, Aina is a design-focused consumer hardware company building a general-purpose AI interface that goes beyond traditional phone touchscreens and keyboards.

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