An ex-Apple designer just raised $100M to fix AI's trust problem — here's his plan

When the guy who designed the iPhone tells you he’s figured out the next computing platform, you pay attention. Jony Ive, alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman, has now confirmed his new startup is building an AI-powered device, and he’s just secured a funding round north of $100 million from Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective and Thrive Capital. LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm, is spearheading the secretive project with a team that now includes nearly a dozen former Apple veterans — the same minds behind the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch touch interfaces. The pitch is deceptively simple but wildly ambitious: create a piece of hardware that feels less like a tool and more like a natural extension of human interaction, specifically engineered to rebuild the trust that screens and social media have eroded. In a rare interview with The New York Times, Ive didn’t mince words about the decade-long cost of the touchscreen revolution, pointing to the compulsive behavior it inadvertently engineered. His bet is that a device leveraging generative AI to understand context and nuance can break that cycle, performing complex tasks without demanding the user’s constant, fractured visual attention. It’s a direct shot at the notification-laden hellscape the smartphone has become, and a gamble that people are ready to pay a premium for a calmer relationship with technology. The AI angle is the real wildcard here. Pairing Ive’s industrial design ethos with Altman’s backend models suggests a product where the interface is the AI — not an app you open, but an ambient intelligence woven into the device’s physical form. The early-stage funding round, first reported by The Information and later confirmed by the Times, marks one of the biggest bets yet on a post-smartphone gadget, a graveyard littered with failures like the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1. But Ive’s track record and the sheer caliber of the team give this project a gravity those others lacked. This isn’t a startup trying to slap a screen on a chatbot; it’s a rethinking of the fundamental ergonomics of computing, and that’s what makes it genuinely worth watching, even if it’s years away from shipping.