11.13.2025
AI Camp: Interfaces - Meet The Companies
It’s an absolute wonder that we can communicate with computers in natural language. The power of these large language models and multimodal AI systems is a breakthrough that, even in a few short years, has shifted the pace of innovation and indeed the shape of our collective future.
And, in classic human fashion, we have taken that for granted. More specifically, founders building new interfaces for AI have taken that for granted. They want more. They demand more, and thank heavens for that.
To think that a text chat is the ultimate method for interacting with AI is akin to thinking that dial-up is the ultimate way to interact with the web, or that a punch card (or even the CLI) is the ultimate method of interacting with a computer. After all, the very first Camp program (all the way back in 2016, which included HuggingFace) was focused on natural language processing and chatbots. It’s been nearly 10 years, and in that time the interface of AI has barely changed.
We at Betaworks, for this Camp, sought out founders who were exploring the bleeding edge of interface in an AI-powered world. And boy did we find them!
Our thesis was, in part, that these powerful closed models will commoditize, and that they will be complimented and supplemented by a wide variety of more specific, vertical, open source models. We’re not the only ones to think that:
I think the scenario in which you only have a few big AI models is a scenario in which not only are those models the smartest, but they're also the cheapest and the most power efficient and the fastest and easiest to adopt and use for every scenario. And I think that's highly unlikely. If [AI] is the breakthrough that we believe it to be, and it's the computer industry V2, you're going to want models in everything. You're going to want AI infused into everything … You're going to have all of these hyper-optimized use cases and so my guess in the way we're betting is that you're going to have that pyramid approach. -Marc Andreesen
Now let’s layer in the fact that the main complaint for most of these powerful LLMs is that they’re generic. Doing the work to contextualize them against a specific problem, workflow, etc. takes quite a bit of time and energy.
It’s why we’ve been spending so much time on memory architectures at the software level.
So… with all that in mind, where should founders be focusing their attention and innovating?
Our answer is simple: the interface.
The interface is the least explored, least iterated space in the whole category and stack of AI, and it’s also the one with the most surface area against actual value (value, in this case = the human being with the wallet and the data and the problem to be solved).
So, without any further ado, I’m excited to introduce ten companies building AI interfaces of the future.
Nora
Founder: Sid Banothu
One liner: Nora is realigning commerce to the consumer, starting with memory and ending with companions that shop the world on your behalf.
Summary: Nora is a browser extension (across Chrome and Safari/Desktop and iOS) that tracks your shopping, helps you remember everything, price checks, suggests, and generally organizes what has become a stressful (nearly antagonistic) shopping experience into something enjoyable and productive. In the future, Sid imagines that your Nora will know enough about you, and be loyally aligned to your wallet and preferences, such that it can negotiate with brands on your behalf and even earn you the money that is currently going into the massive cyclone of advertising, referrals, click tracking, cookies, etc. Oh, and you can finally close all those tabs.
Why we invested: Sid probably has more domain expertise around this particular problem space than almost any founder we’ve encountered. He’s worked on products in ecommerce, advertising and AI at Google, Meta, and Whop, servicing billions of customers. His insight around memory and shopping interfaces, and his tempo building and iterating on this product, were irresistible to us.
Primitive
Founder: Kasey Klimes
One liner: The agentic OS for founders
Summary: Primitive is a web app that turns big goals into small subtasks, complete with all their dependencies. Founders tend to be the bottleneck for their teams, and the same is true as we incorporate agents into our workflows. Primitive lets people brain dump their goals into the system via voice and link in with other tools like Notion and calendars. It can then generate a sprawling list of inter-connected tasks and sub-tasks, some of which can be done agentically (and those agents can even escape containment and start working in other tools). The critical technology here is the context preservation around these goals and tasks (and the data that informs them) for both humans and agents trying to be hyperproductive in an AI world.
Why we invested: Part of the Betaworks superpower is an army of loyal founders who help us see around corners. When nearly a dozen founders in our community told us we had to get Kasey Klimes in a Camp, we were keen to meet with him. That’s when he told us about his architecture that condenses context across humans and AI to enable proactive agents for non-technical teams via a visual and voice-first interface.
Patina
Founders: Sean Raspet and Laura Sisson
One liner: The sensory foundation model
Summary: Patina is like Sora for scent and flavor. The team have combined protein folding on the 289 known olfactory receptors and qsar through deep GNNs to create the first ever ‘scent photograph.’ This foundation model, and the techniques behind it, unlock opportunities for safer and more captivating blockbuster fragrance molecules (current blockbusters generate some ~$100m/year per molecule). The Patina model can also help target new molecules that can create ultra-realistic synthetics for natural essential oils (like rose oil) which can be costly and carbon intensive. Patina is also at the forefront of the latest research around olfactory receptors in the skin, developing molecules that, in silica, have been found to imbue therapeutic properties like anti-aging and wound healing.
Why we invested: We believe that, in the future, there will be many many models for many different uses. Patina gave us the opportunity to get in at the ground level of a very different type of foundation model focused on flavor and fragrance, which is a material sense that is difficult to compress and digitize. The team is incredibly impressive and the more we learned about the variety of applications for this technology, and the subtle significance of the nose as an interface that influences our decisions and behavior, the more excited we were to back this company.
MyPlace, by Orange
Founder: Helen Huang
One liner:A new language for identity, built through play
Summary: Orange is a technology built on three pillars: a simulation creator, a behavioral data engine, and a dynamic interface generator that makes realistic recreations of human interactions (writing emails, responding to texts, messaging apps). Together, these pillars form a platform that is called MyPlace. On MyPlace, users can play a daily micro-game that looks and feels more like a simulation from their everyday lives, the lives they want, or scenarios that reveal things about their character. It could be a stressful situation at work or an interaction with a friend or a loved one. MyPlace then takes that data and uses it to help you understand yourself, and that could take the shape of frameworks like Enneagram, Meyers Briggs, etc based on user preference. The insight is that play brings out the truth of who we are, which is not what we say about ourselves but how we make decisions and behave. Eventually, this technology could be used by dating apps, recruiters, or any company interested in understanding human performance, but it could also become the identity layer that helps strangers and friends alike identify you in a world where it’s harder and harder to differentiate between the real thing and AI.
Why we invested: We’ve wondered what AI means for self-knowledge and expression and been actively looking for an investment in that space. Helen surprised us with her insights around play as a generative interface being the purest input to the models, and with her big vision around behavioral data as an identity layer in the age of AI. Her tempo and dedication to validation didn’t hurt.
Putty
Founder: Kevin Chang
Summary: Stealth
Why we invested: Every project and experience of Kevin's has been a recapitulation of his belief in more personal computing experiences. From our first call it was clear he's deeply engaged with concepts we care about – memory systems, ambient interfaces, technology fitted to the more sporadic rhythm of life. Between the impassioned beliefs and his experiences, the fit was obvious as daylight.
Telepath
Founders: Stephen Hood, Josh Whiting and Rupert Manfredi
One liner: A revolutionary new personal computing experience, built from the ground up for the AI era.
Summary: Telepath is building the first sensemaking computer. This computer has no apps, and is built natively with AI that has a deep understanding of the user and the data on the computer, without the siloes usually formed by those application sandboxes. This starts with a series of parallel agents that look at the user’s existing data – Granola notes, Obsidian files, etc. – and analyze for things like network connections, opinions and beliefs, etc. to help thought leaders quickly ingest new information, formulate and update their beliefs, and make sense of those beliefs in a way that’s legible to others.
Why we invested: The current paradigm around personal computing is built on a series of accrued decisions, all underpinned by the idea that computers don’t understand natural language. That foundation is no longer true, and the Telepath team represented a massively ambitious vision around reinventing the entire software and hardware ecosystem built on this new AI foundation, with an interface that is both visual and voice powered. (Side note: Previous Camp company Unternet merged with Telepath after the former colleagues realized their shared ambitions.)
Feather
Founders: ShaoBo Zhang and Marco Yu
One liner: Feather does your digital chores the moment they arrive
Summary: Feather is an OS-level client that uses the richest personal data set you have (your email) to create agentic workflows for life’s stickiest and most annoying tasks. Things like hunting for an apartment, planning a wedding, buying a house, shopping for a car, dealing with a health issue, etc. are difficult, task-oriented, and (unfortunately) highly specific and personalized challenges. That’s why software has had to be built on a vertical basis for any of those things. That also means that the user is required to inject their individual context into those apps and services. With Feather, any of those ‘hair-on-fire’ challenges can be handled by AI, with minimal interaction from the user, because they have the context that flows naturally through the user’s email.
Why we invested: As head of product at Rabbit, ShaoBo became obsessed with interaction and interface in an AI native world. Despite the fact that the original prototype he showed us didn’t display the polish and sheen of his expansive design portfolio (yet), it performed exceptionally well at the task at hand – low-latency and high accuracy RAG across tens of thousands of emails. That performance is the foundation of a product that does far more than search.
nubrain
Founders: Priyanka Jain and Ingo Marquardt
One liner: Foundation models for brain data
Summary: Nubrain is creating the world’s first and largest proprietary data set of EEG data, using that data to train models that decode human thoughts into text, images and speech. Their first model, OB1, translates raw EEG signals into images with 20x higher accuracy than chance. This comes at a time when the hardware around EEG capture is becoming cheaper and more accessible to consumers.
Why we invested: As is true with Patina, our belief that the world will be shaped by many models for many uses influenced our investment decision around nubrain. It feels inevitable that brain computer interfaces are just a matter of when, and not if, and key to that will be foundation models capable of reading EEG data. The nubrain team brings a combination of technical and business expertise that justifies their place as a horse worth betting on in this race.
Presq
Founders: Adam Saleh, Steve Burstyn and Mikey Robins
One liner: Presq is a prompt-to-product platform for physical consumer goods
Summary: Presq is a platform that ingests data from influencers and creators (such as athletes and musicians, who are coincidentally sick of shilling products that don’t mean anything to them) to develop a prompt interface and model ‘trained’ on the creators’ preferences. Creators can then iterate via prompt on the product they’d like to build (for now, the company focuses on footwear but will eventually expand to eyewear, jewelry, home goods, etc.) and Presq ensures that it meets the requirements of manufacturability (durability, safety, etc.) to be 3D printed in days instead of months. Presq is building a future that is mass-bespoke.
Why we invested: We’ve been looking at prompt to product as a category for a while and we’re deeply intrigued by Adam’s experience in 3D printing / footwear for Carbon and excited by the progress with one of his first customers, O’Dell Beckham Jr. That, paired with the design aesthetic of this company and the stellar demo, made this a relatively straightforward decision. We believe, alongside Adam, that prompt to product can scale across product categories.
Intension
Founders: Conor Sanchez-O'Shea and Gabriel Duemichen
One Liner: Reclaiming humanity’s most important resource—attention.
Summary: Intension is building the Oura for your attention on the desktop. The software tracks your attention, a combination of your focus, intention and capacity, to first help you visualize your tendencies (similar to how Oura gives you a score around various health metrics) and then obfuscates away the parts of your desktop that are interrupting you. In other words, you may intend to focus on a project that requires only a couple of apps, conversations with only a few select people, and access to a few documents or files. Everything else is ‘removed’ from your sight, and interruptions are limited (or AI proactively responds on your behalf), so that you can get things done without constantly paying the taxes of context switching. Eventually, Intension believes it can build your own personal model that is trained for you, not by you.
Why we invested: The Intension team had brought together absolutely stellar talent from Tesla, Humane, and Meta. But beyond the skill of the team, the commitment to using the interface (which is at the OS-level and highly personalized) as a way to do good in the world, and prop up the ideology around local inference, user-owned data and attention-protecting interfaces was a perfect fit for Betaworks and for this camp.
ABOUT CAMP:
Camp is a thematic investment and in-residence program for startups building in frontier technologies. Betaworks believes in thesis-based investing, and since Camp started in 2016 we’ve been honing and iterating on our thesis around artificial intelligence. We started with BotCamp (HuggingFace) in 2016 and have done twelve Camps since, some of which focus on a single mode of applied machine learning (NLP, computer vision) and, more recently, others which focus on a horizontal slice of the AI stack (agentic infrastructure, interfaces, etc.).
Camp’s thematic organization allows us to create relevant programming and bring together strategic industry connections to support the founders in the early days. It also means that the Camp participants have a lot in common – from tech infrastructure, to sales strategy, to investors. One of our core beliefs is that the best resource for founders is other founders. We’ve seen the magic that happens when we bring together a community of entrepreneurs who are at similar points in their journey, and building in the same core area of technology.
Unlike typical accelerator programs, Camp focuses specifically on product development and early product-market fit. Alongside the basics of business building, our curriculum goes deep into the thematic focus area to uncover the latest techniques, research papers, and tooling on behalf of our cohort of startups.
Each Camp company receives $500k in investment from Betaworks and a syndicate of co-investors. In the case of AI Camp: Interfaces, co-investors include True Ventures, Slack Fund, RRE, and Fermont Capital.
