Friend
Pendant necklace (~2 inches). Always-on listening feeds a persistent AI companion persona. Companionship-framed rather than productivity / recall. Cloud LLM backend; no detailed encryption claims.
Active · Verified 2026-10-28 · fresh as of 2026-10-28 · 37 cited facts, 9 with a third-party source · 1 recorded change · Suggest a correction
At a glance
- Type
- Always-on AI companion pendant vendor fix
- Tier
- T1
- Section
- Voice-first / wearable AI memory
- Created
- 2024 (founded 2024; $2.5M seed Jul 2024; began shipping summer 2025) third-party fix
- Latest release
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- License
- not applicable — not OSS fix
- GitHub
- not applicable — no GitHub repo fix
- Pricing
- Hardware-bundled third-party fix
- Funding
- $10M total (self-raised $2.5M seed + additional $7.5M; backers: Caffeinated Capital, Z Fellows) third-party fix
- Freshness
- 2026-10-28 fix
- Layer
- agent-infra repo fix
- Licensing
- commercial third-party fix
Memory taxonomy
- storage
- vector
- retrieval
- similarity
- persistence
- lifelong
- update
- append-only
- unit
- episode
- governance
- opaque
- conflict
- append
When to use
Optimised for: always-on capture + lifelog timeline + voice UX
Anti-fit: not for enterprise compliance-regulated environments without explicit consent flows
Pros & cons
Pros
Companionship framing rather than productivity — addresses a different need than the rest of the wearable category.
Cons
Consumer reaction has been mixed; cloud LLM backend with limited privacy disclosure.
Claims & capabilities
$99 launch / now $129. Began shipping summer 2025 (delayed from Q1). Drew significant backlash from a $11k NYC billboard campaign late 2025.
Technical surface
- API surface
- not applicable — consumer device
- Backend storage
- custom
- Deployment
- Managed-only
- Embedding model
- locked
- Multi-tenancy
- hard-isolation (per device)
- MCP
- searched not found
- A2A
- searched not found
- OpenTelemetry
- searched not found
Compare Friend with…
Alternatives to Friend → live options ranked by shared design, licence, hosting and MCP support
Similar systems
Other voice-first / wearable ai memory in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
- Granola T1
Mac/iOS app (no hardware). Captures meeting audio via system-audio tap (no bot joining); generates notes from your shorthand + audio. Local audio processing claim; cloud for summaries. Enterprise tier opts out of model training.
- Bee T1
Acquired by Amazon (Jul 2025); bee.computer is now © Amazon and sells the Bee Frontier wearable ($74.99), with a Bee Eclipse device marked coming soon. Small wearable (pendant / clip / bracelet). Continuous capture; converts speech to text immediately; never stores raw audio . Daily summaries, personal fact sheet, to-do suggestions. Cloud processing on derived text only.
- Era Computer T5
Software platform / OS layer for AI wearables (glasses, rings, pendants, speakers) that abstracts hardware from AI orchestration. Memory and model providers are pluggable and user-controlled rather than cloud-locked; supports 130+ LLMs from 14+ providers. Founded 2025 by ex-Humane team.
- Limitless T1
Former Rewind/Limitless lifelog (Pendant wearable + screen/audio capture with timeline search). Acquired by Meta (2025-12); Pendant no longer sold as of 2025-12-05, service withdrawn from the EU, UK, Brazil, China, Israel, South Korea and Turkey on 2025-12-05, desktop/web recording ended and Rewind capture disabled from 2025-12-19; existing Pendant customers supported throughout 2026.
- Memories.ai LVMM 2.0 / Project LUCI T2
Developer-first reference platform for AI wearables. LVMM 2.0 captures visual data through video, encodes it into frames on-device, and stores moments as searchable memories; companion app surfaces past conversations/decisions/experiences. Hardware-level security via Qualcomm partnership; cloud sync for enterprise tiers.
- Omi T1
Wearable orb (necklace or clip) with open-source hardware + firmware. Continuous audio capture; real-time GPT-4o transcription; searchable memory graph. Supports app screen capture too. Hybrid privacy: cloud by default (SOC 2/HIPAA/AES-256), full local/self-hosted available under MIT.
Sources (36 cited facts, 9 third-party)
Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).
- What it is Always-on AI companion pendant vendor
- What it does & what's distinct Pendant necklace (~2 inches). Always-on listening feeds a persistent AI companion person… vendor
- Claims / benefits $99 launch / now $129. Began shipping summer 2025 (delayed from Q1). Drew significant ba… vendor
- Modalities voice vendor
- Created 2024 (founded 2024; $2.5M seed Jul 2024; began shipping summer 2025) third-party
- Mindshare 2 HN third-party
- Funding $10M total (self-raised $2.5M seed + additional $7.5M; backers: Caffeinated Capital, Z F… third-party
- Pricing Hardware-bundled third-party
- Compliance No formal certifications; no independent security audit published third-party
- Data handling Audio stored locally in 32MB ring buffer (~3h); no cloud storage of conversations third-party
- Deployment Managed-only vendor
- HQ US third-party
- Founders / pedigree 2.5M self-raised; solo founder Avi Schiffmann third-party
- Memory volume / scale no scale claim vendor
- Backend storage custom vendor
- Multi-tenancy hard-isolation (per device) vendor
- Encryption at-rest + in-transit vendor
- Embedding model locked vendor
- Versioning immutable append-log vendor
- Tombstoning append-only no delete vendor
- Schema evolution schema with migration vendor
- Namespace primitives per-user vendor
- Contradiction handling always append (no resolution) vendor
- Forgetting policy none (permanent) vendor
- Validated verticals consumer / individual (voice + wearable users) vendor
- Time to running <1day (purchase hardware + pair) or <10min (software-only meeting bots) vendor
- Anti-fit not for enterprise compliance-regulated environments without explicit consent flows vendor
- Optimised for always-on capture + lifelog timeline + voice UX vendor
- Adjacent infrastructure self-contained device + cloud back-end vendor
- Pros Companionship framing rather than productivity — addresses a different need than the res… vendor
- Cons Consumer reaction has been mixed; cloud LLM backend with limited privacy disclosure. vendor
- Project & sources friend.com shipping delay (TC) vendor
- architecture-deployment-locus cloud vendor
- licensing-bucket commercial third-party
- positioning-platform-vs-product product vendor
- taxonomy-three-layer-rollup agent-infra repo
What changed
Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)
- 2026-10-23
- Funding / ownership “$10M total (self-raised $2.5M seed + additional $7.5M; backers: Caffeinated Capital, Z Fellows, Perplexity CEO Arav…” → “$10M total (self-raised $2.5M seed + additional $7.5M; backers: Caffeinated Capital, Z Fellows)” source
- Compliance “No formal certifications; no independent security audit published; data use terms include biometric consent and tra…” → “No formal certifications; no independent security audit published” source