Ex-Ultrahuman VP raises $5.5M for AI input hardware, betting the bottleneck is command — not capture

Aina, founded by former Ultrahuman hardware VP Apoorv Shankar, raised $5.5M led by Redstart Labs and 360 ONE. Shankar left Ultrahuman in 2025 after finding devices like the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin disappointing. His thesis: human-AI interaction is bottlenecked by input, not ambient capture. First shipping product Dune is a three-key, context-aware macro keyboard.