companies

Based Hardware Inc.

San Francisco startup behind Omi, an open-source AI wearable pendant that renamed itself after a trademark dispute over the name 'Friend.'

Based Hardware was founded by Nik Shevchenko, a Thiel Fellow, and is headquartered in San Francisco. The company originally launched its wearable under the name Friend via crowdfunding, but renamed the product Omi after a separate, unrelated startup founded by Avi Schiffmann bought the friend.com domain and began selling its own pendant under the same name, a dispute that spilled into a public spat between the two founders. Omi is a small pendant or clip-on device that streams audio to a phone app, where it's transcribed and summarized into action items, reminders and a searchable memory the company calls a 'Brain Map.' The hardware and firmware are open source and published on GitHub, and Based Hardware also sells an enterprise-oriented version aimed at teams and internal knowledge capture. The company has raised roughly $2 million from investors including Tim Draper and 468 Capital, on top of about $700,000 raised earlier, and says its products are used by hundreds of thousands of people.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

hardware