Two former senior technology executives from Meituan-W have joined forces to establish a startup that has introduced what they claim to be the world's first multimodal AI wearable device.

The startup, Looki, has successfully completed three funding rounds - angel, angel+, and Pre-A - within six months, raising over $10 million USD in total. The latest round was led by EBVC, with existing investors BAI, Alpha Startups, and Songge Ventures participating with additional investments. The funding will be used to continue product development and team building.

Looki's inaugural product, the L1, is priced at $199 USD, with global shipping scheduled to begin in September 2025.

At first glance, the Looki L1 might be mistaken for a pendant-style camera due to its compact design. Weighing just 30 grams, the device offers flexible wearing options and is primarily used by magnetically attaching it to the chest for video recording.

However, the L1 is neither an action camera nor simply a GPT-powered pendant, nor is it intended as a smartphone replacement. When activated, it captures visual and audio signals, processes environmental perception data, autonomously perceives the physical world, and enables truly human-centered personalized AI interaction.

Looki highlights the L1's "Story Mode," also known as intelligent interval shooting, which provides 12-hour battery life to meet users' all-day life recording needs. The Looki AI features native multimodal capabilities with full-chain perception-understanding/decision-generation abilities, ensuring that life recording extends beyond just time and image dimensions.

Through intelligent analysis and understanding of captured video content, the system perceives and integrates multimodal information including scenes, human actions, and voice. Looki AI provides users with life insights, generates event understanding, pushes highlight moments, and automatically edits daily vlogs.

Similar to how mobile phones evolved from communication devices to service ecosystems, AI hardware needs to build services around data content, becoming human-centered interaction portals.

According to Looki founder and CEO Sun Yang, the L1 is essentially an AI-native carrier, with life scene recording serving as an entry point. "When we started this venture, we were thinking more about what AI-human interaction should look like and how AI should reach consumers. Our first thought was to let AI enter life scenarios, allowing AI to break out of dialogue boxes and feed itself prompts in the physical world like humans do, establishing a Personal Context layer to enable Personal AI and various Agent services. The next generation of interaction isn't natural language, but AI's perceptual resonance with humans."

Sun Yang believes Looki focuses more on the services and value delivered to users after understanding the physical world's context. Currently, users most visibly see features like highlight moment pushes and automatic daily vlog editing. However, users may not realize that the more life recordings and longer usage time, the better Looki AI understands them, experiencing life's highlights and valleys together and growing alongside users.

For example, before a late-night snack, users can ask Looki AI about their daily calorie intake; during workouts, the device can be magnetically attached to equipment for recording, and users can later ask Looki AI about their progress; after losing temper with children, Looki AI can help analyze reasons and guide better communication methods.

The Looki team positions the L1 as a wearable camera that perceives and understands the physical world, constructing a human-centered AI interaction portal. This is why Looki L1 is defined as the world's first multimodal AI wearable device.

The AI glasses sector continues to gain momentum, with both startups and established companies entering the market. Sun Yang and his team also considered the AI glasses direction: "Every form factor has its advantages and disadvantages. AI glasses currently face an 'impossible triangle' regarding battery life, weight, and functionality, so companies make trade-offs in product definition. We first think about how to unleash AI's full potential to create greater value for users, then consider what hardware form factor can meet those requirements today. When supply chain capabilities mature, migrating to new form factors becomes natural. Too many people care about form factors without focusing on the core."

Sun Yang believes future AI carriers will be personalized and diverse - some people wear glasses, others choose earphones, some use pendants, and there may be other forms. The core of next-generation AI hardware is the interaction portal and how to define the relationship between humans and AI.

Regarding team background, both Looki co-founders Sun Yang and Liu Bocong are graduates of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). CEO Sun Yang previously served as head of intelligent hardware at Meituan-W, senior R&D director at Momenta, and was a founding member of Google Assistant. CTO Liu Bocong was formerly the head of autonomous driving algorithms at Meituan-W and a founding member of Pony.AI.

Other team members graduated from prestigious institutions including University of Toronto, Zhejiang University, and London School of Economics, and have worked at renowned companies such as Google, Amazon, Qualcomm, and ByteDance, bringing deep expertise and extensive practical experience in AI algorithms and engineering, hardware, and consumer electronics.