Persona raises $10 million for an AI assistant with a $179 wristband in the works

Persona, the AI assistant startup founded by Cal AI co-founder Zach Yadegari, has raised $10 million in a round led by Vine Ventures, TechCrunch reported October 8. Its free iMessage beta is already available; a planned $179 wristband would give users another way to reach an assistant designed to handle everyday tasks.

From Cal AI to an assistant in iMessage

Yadegari’s move follows the sale of Cal AI, the calorie-tracking app he co-founded, to MyFitnessPal in March. The acquisition price was not disclosed. MyFitnessPal told TechCrunch at the time that Cal AI had generated more than $30 million in annual revenue in under two years.

He initially joined the buyer with his co-founders and continued working on Cal AI. He told TechCrunch he left in June and went straight to work on Persona. Another co-founder is involved but has not yet been announced. Z Fellows founder Cory Levy and Collective Global joined Vine Ventures in the new funding round.

For now, users interact with Persona through iMessage text messages. Yadegari says the assistant can order food or rides, take notes, book travel, and answer questions and emails. That makes the funded business more than a hardware proposal: the software beta is available while the wearable and a separate app remain in development.

Yadegari reported “a few thousand beta users” and “five figures in preorder revenue” for the band. Those are founder-supplied early traction figures, not measures of how reliably the assistant completes its tasks. His ambition is to put the services people use each day behind a single AI assistant.

A wrist shortcut, with processing in the cloud

Persona expects its $179 band to become available in December. Yadegari says it will not continuously listen or record. Instead, users will activate the assistant by pressing a button, or configure it to respond to a flick of the wrist. The proposed interface is a deliberate request, rather than an always-listening device.

The company says it encrypts data both while it travels and while it is stored, and lets users delete their data. It also promises that user conversations will remain private and cannot be sold to advertisers or data brokers. These are Persona’s stated protections, not independently verified security findings.

Yadegari says the team is building safeguards against phishing and prompt-injection attempts. He also promises the assistant cannot see a user’s credit-card details. Purchases will require user approval, with payments handled by external providers such as Stripe Link. Persona’s purchase capability is thus presented with an explicit approval step, not permission to spend without asking.

Shopping ads and a promise of neutrality

Not selling conversations does not mean avoiding advertising. Persona’s current business model relies on ads, and Yadegari says sponsored products will appear during shopping research. The promise is that recommendations can remain unbiased because the assistant will not know which items are advertised, he told TechCrunch.

His example is office-chair shopping: the assistant would use someone’s preferences to show matching chairs, with sponsored results among them. The distinction is between withholding sponsorship information from the agent and removing sponsored products from the experience. Persona proposes the former, while retaining ads as part of the service.

Beyond requests initiated by users, Yadegari eventually wants Persona to become more proactive: offering help and solving problems before someone knows they need assistance. That remains his longer-term ambition.