Focus on "AI-native platform": Nothing secures 200 million dollars

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The London-based start-up Nothing has announced the completion of a Series C financing round worth 200 million US dollars. The company intends to use the newly raised money to develop an AI-native platform. The round was led by Tiger Global. The company received further support from existing investors GV, Highland Europe, EQT, Latitude, I2BF, and Tapestry, as well as new strategic partners such as Nikhil Kamath and Qualcomm Ventures.

Founded in 2021 by Carl Pei and other former OnePlus employees, Nothing is now valued at 1.3 billion US dollars, according to the company. With the new millions, the start-up wants to open the "next chapter" and create a platform "on which hardware and software merge into an intelligent overall system".

Hardware must continue to evolve

As Nothing co-founder writes in an article, he is convinced that the smartphone will continue to play a central role in the age of artificial intelligence. Over the past 18 years, it has become the "most important tool" for organizing life. With its "access to context and user knowledge", it is "the most powerful consumer device ever".

AI has made great progress in the past three years, but the smartphone experience has hardly evolved. AI functions on the smartphone are limited to "marginal improvements in the camera, translations or voice assistants" and provide little added value.

Nothing is aiming to change this: "For AI to reach its full potential, the hardware also needs to evolve," writes Pei. "We believe in a new operating system – that really understands its users, adapts, recognizes contexts and takes over tasks." The system should simplify everyday life and allow people to focus on the essentials. "Instead of one universal solution, a billion individual operating systems will be created for a billion people."

Personal operating system for everything

However, the Nothing CEO does not go into hardware-related changes in his comments, but instead focuses on the software. Ultimately, his vision also tends to reflect what the big players such as Google and Apple are pursuing. Devices should be more proactive and become more of a personal assistant for users.

The goal that Nothing's operating system should work across all devices "in the long term" is also nothing new. Here, the manufacturer sees an initial entry point via device categories such as smartphones, audio products and smartwatches. In the long term, Pei sees the system expanding to smart glasses, humanoid robots, electric vehicles and other categories.

This goal is reminiscent of the one pursued by Xiaomi with HyperOS and Huawei with HarmonyOS. Both manufacturers offer their networked platforms for a wide range of product categories, from smartphones to cars.

"A new class of devices will emerge"

The expansion of AI in various well-known product categories is not the end of the story, says Pei. A new device could soon follow that is "smarter, more context-aware and ubiquitous". He does not say what he is specifically aiming for. He is being as cryptic as OpenAI with his AI gadget, which is neither an earbud nor a wearable.

The topic of AI is basically still quite new for Nothing: with the Phone 3a, the manufacturer announced the first features of its own AI platform and gave the smartphone a dedicated "Essential" button. Users can use this to access various AI functions in the "Essential Space". Screenshots, notes and text or voice snippets are collected in this space. The AI is supposed to extract the most important information from these and process it in a meaningful way.

So far, this is not convincing: "Essential doesn't seem really useful yet, many things can be done just as quickly elsewhere", writes heise online in a test of Phone 3a. The previous solutions were only the first attempts at artificial intelligence: Nothing wants to present the first "AI-native devices" in 2026.

(afl)