At the beginning of 2026, the AI-native hardware sector welcomed a strong start. Recently, the AI hardware startup Looki announced a $20 million Series A funding round. This round was led by Ant Group, with additional investments from Meituan Longzhu, HD International, and Zhongguancun Capital, while existing investors BAI Capital, Alpha Sphere, and Tongge Venture also continued to support the company.

Looki was founded in May 2024. With its strong founding team background, the company has completed four rounds of financing within just over a year. The two core founders both come from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU): CEO Sun Yang was a founding member of Google Assistant and has held key R&D and management positions at Momenta and Meituan; CTO Liu Bocong was a founding member of Pony.ai and led Meituan's autonomous driving algorithm projects.

In terms of product performance, Looki has already shown significant market potential. Its first multimodal AI hardware, Looki L1 international version, was launched in August 2025 and quickly sold out. In December of the same year, Looki officially entered the domestic market and launched the domestic version on the JD.com platform. As of now, the global cumulative sales of this product series have approached 10,000 units, maintaining high discussion levels on social media.

After this round of funding, Looki will focus the funds on talent development, model iteration, and supply chain integration. Founder Sun Yang stated that Looki's core philosophy is to build "human-centered" AI, aiming to enhance human capabilities through next-generation interaction interfaces. With the capital injection, Looki will accelerate technological accumulation and continue exploring more possibilities of AI hardware as a new form of interaction medium.

Key Points:

  • 💰 Funding Scale: Looki completed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Ant Group, attracting participation from multiple well-known institutions such as Meituan Longzhu.

  • 🎓 Elite Team: The founders come from CMU, and the core members have backgrounds from big companies such as Google, Meituan, and Pony.ai, covering full-stack experience in AI algorithms and hardware engineering.

  • 🚀 Market Response: The first wearable AI hardware Looki L1 has sold nearly 10,000 units globally, achieving rapid deployment from overseas to domestic markets through multimodal interaction.