We Found the Sucker Willing to Buy Humane, and as Promised, I’m Going to Be Insufferable, Because of Course It Was HP

Brody Ford, reporting for Bloomberg:

HP Inc. will acquire assets from Humane Inc., the maker of a wearable Ai Pin introduced in late 2023, for $116 million.

The deal will include the majority of Humane’s employees in addition to its software platform and intellectual property, the company said Tuesday. It will not include Humane’s Ai pin device business, which will be wound down, an HP spokesperson said.

Humane’s team, including founders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial intelligence into the company’s personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms, said Tuan Tran, who leads HP’s AI initiatives. Chaudhri and Bongiorno were design and software engineers at Apple Inc. before founding the startup.

Yours truly, last May, when news broke that Humane was looking for a buyer, “seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale”:

I suspect they’ll sell for a pittance — way less than the $230 million they’ve raised. I just don’t see what they have to offer. Humane doesn’t own the AI that powers the AI Pin — that comes from OpenAI, which seemingly not only doesn’t want to buy Humane, but is supposedly in exploratory talks with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom to design and build their own AI devices. The laser projector idea seems to be a bust, and the hardware’s battery life is measured in hours between battery pack swaps.

Off the top of my head, the only company that could afford a $1 billion-ish price for Humane and is dumb enough to do it is HP.

Well, at least we can say HP was smart enough not to spend $1 billion on this. But they were dumb enough to bring into their company Chaudhri, who was described to me, by someone who worked with him at Apple (and a person whom I’ve never heard badmouth a single other former colleague), as “an utter fraud”. But a fraud whose personal website is an inadvertent testimony to the lunacy of the U.S. patent system — that it serves ego inflation, not innovation.

But who knows? Maybe I’m all wet and Humane will prove to HP what NeXT proved to Apple, and we’ll all be hanging on every thread of Imran Chaudhri keynotes in a few years and he’ll lead HP back to greatness. (Almost laughed spittle onto my screen there.)

★ Tuesday, 18 February 2025