Ollie is betting its focus on privacy can help it win the AI assistant race; plus, Qualcomm backs Ultrahuman

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1:13That's Framer.com slash tcstartups rules and restrictions may apply. For an AI assistant to become truly useful, it first has to know a lot about you. Ali, a personal assistant for everyday life, is betting that doesn't mean you have to hand over all your data and sacrifice your privacy in the process. While some enterprise-focused AI assistants have data privacy protections in place, Ali is among the first mainstream, family-focused AI to achieve SOC 2 compliance, a framework that allows a company to demonstrate through an independent audit that it has formal controls in place to protect customer data and operate its systems securely.

1:59Achieving this was an important milestone for Oli's team as it signals to potential users that the assistant is not trying to scoop up your personal data for other purposes, like AI training. Ali co-founder and CEO Bill Lennon told TechCrunch, We fundamentally think that trust and privacy are absolutely imperative, and that's why our business model is a subscription, because we want our users to know that Ali works for you. We're not sharing your data with anyone. There are many personal AI assistants positioning themselves as consumer-friendly solutions focused on integrating with users' daily lives via text messages, which is why Oli's privacy angle could prove a significant differentiator.

2:46Nowadays, Oli competes with other existing text-based assistants like Poke, Fambot, Ohai, Folk, Saner.ai, and Tomo. There are also a number of assistants focused more on work, calendar management, and email, like Town, Lindy, and Reclaim.ai. And of course, there's Instinct, the AI assistant, that just landed$350 million in funding at a$2.5 billion valuation before it even launched. To say the space is heating up is kind of putting it mildly. By comparison, San Diego-based Ali has raised a much more modest$7.5 million seed round, largely from Kostla Ventures along with AI House. Despite the utility these assistants provide, consumers who turn to these tools are wrestling with how much privacy and personal data they want to give up in the process.

3:41Instinct, for example, came under fire for its overly broad terms of service and privacy policy that granted it a perpetual and irrevocable license to access, use, host, cache, store, reproduce, transmit, display, publish, distribute, and modify any of the user's materials, including for training its AI models. Yikes. Lennon is taking a different approach with OLLI. Currently, this family assistant connects to calendars and email to organize family schedules and keep its users updated about their days. It also offers tools that can help you plan meals, shop for groceries, track to-dos, book appointments, and pay bills via group chats.

4:24Later, it may help manage household budgets as well. And yes, all this access requires trust, which OLLI claims is its value add compared to its rival. Lennon said, we're not sharing your data with anyone. This is super sensitive, and that is necessary to win the trust of the users. In addition to the data protections provided by SOC 2 compliance, OLLI does not request usernames or passwords to complete its tasks. When OLLI needs to log in to a website on the user's behalf, it does so using its own browser in the cloud and sends the user a link to a remote session in the browser. The process is similar when the assistant needs to make a payment or purchase on the user's behalf.

5:08While this method offers security, the downside is that users always have to log in to complete certain tasks. Still, that's something Lenin believes technology will improve upon end time. He said, this is new territory. I think in the future we will do some form of hard tokenization in a secure way, so you're not going to have to re-enter your information every time. That's frontier stuff. We want to find the right user experience that balances convenience and trust. Building that trust will be important before users trust Ali to access more sensitive materials, like their bank accounts, even if that's through a connector like Plaid.

5:51Lennon, who has a PhD in AI, also has a background in fintech, having previously sold his startup Groundwork, a neobank for non-profits back in 2021. That experience could help as Ali moves further into money management. Still, it's not yet clear if people even want any of this assistance. Lennon is hopeful, though, saying that OLLI's retention curves are consistent with the leading AI subscriptions in terms of paid subscribers. He didn't share how many users or paid consumers are now using OLLI, saying that space is too competitive. These systems can also be hit or miss at times, despite the hype around instinct.

6:34One of TechCrunch's first tests with it was to price out hotels and then book one, and it quoted all the wrong rates. Ali, meanwhile, experienced an infrastructure outage with its text provider when TechCrunch was testing it, and it stopped responding altogether. TechCrunch asked the founder how Ali is handling such problems, given that most consumers only give a new app or technology one shot. If it's broken, they simply move on. Lennon agreed this is an issue with AI overall, saying, this is the challenge with LLMs in general, because their stochastic, in essence, involve probability. They're inherently unreliable.

7:15We have to essentially build the harness, the agent harness, in a defensive way to catch and prevent those things. It's almost like there's just 1 ,000 cuts that you've got to solve first. The Indian startup best known for making smart rings, UltraHuman, has raised$70 million in a new funding round that includes backing from Qualcomm's venture arm as it looks beyond sleep and health tracking to build a ring that can run software on the device and eventually power everything from AI interactions to games. The round values Bingalaroo-based UltraHuman at $365 million, about three times its$120 million valuation back in 2023.

7:59Qualcomm Ventures participated in the financing alongside U.S. diagnostics giant LabCorp, AlphaWave, Bloom Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and Alteria Capital. The round includes$65 million in primary equity and$5 million in debt. UltraHuman is also working with Qualcomm on a new ring that will use the U.S. chipmaker's silicon. The startup currently uses chips from Nordic Semiconductor in its rings and plans to continue using them alongside Qualcomm's technology. The added computing power will allow more software and algorithms to run directly on the ring, reducing its reliance on a phone or the cloud.

8:41This could open the Ring to use cases well beyond health and sleep tracking, something UltraHuman Rings are known for. Developers could eventually write their own programs for the device, while UltraHuman is exploring ways for the Ring to work as a pointer or a mouse, a game controller, a car key, and an interface for interacting with AI. While the Qualcomm-powered Ring is planned to come later, UltraHuman is not waiting for the new hardware to start testing that idea. Some of the new capabilities will arrive on the startup's existing Ring Air and Ring Pro through a software update by the end of September, including features that would let the Ring work as a game controller and interact with AI applications.

9:25It will also have the ability to allow third-party developers to build new features. UltraHuman's idea is to take advantage of the Ring's position on a user's finger. Unlike a smartwatch, a ring could act as a precise pointing and interaction device, while also carrying physiological context, such as a user's heart rate, temperature, and movement. UltraHuman is also looking to work more closely with LabCorp as it tries to push its rings deeper into health and diagnostics. The companies are exploring whether the blood flow signals captured by the ring when paired with blood test data could help identify health risks in areas such as cardiovascular health, fertility and aging.

10:10That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to TechCrunch.com.

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