Rice 📿

Opening Remarks

This week, I’ve been thinking about one of the most underrated ways to raise money: investor updates.

Even if a VC passes, founders should ask to add them to the monthly updates. It keeps the door open and helps them buy into the story over time. Investor attention is hard to get, but updates are a tool that can be used to stay top of mind. Now, onto this week’s feature:

-Brett

Bulletpitch’s publication covers the hottest early-stage startup before being picked up by larger media outlets. If that’s you, apply here.

Setting the Scene

• Throughout a busy workday, professionals juggle countless conversations from scheduled meetings to spontaneous hallway chats and client visits.

• Amid the pace and volume, recalling every detail can be a challenge.

• In high stakes fields like consulting, pharma, and manufacturing, these unrecorded moments don’t just cost clarity, they can cost billions in missed opportunities, rework, and inefficiency.

• This week’s company is building a product to ensure no in-person conversation during the workday falls through the cracks.

In a Sentence

Rice is an offline-first wearable AI that captures in person conversations, transforming them into transcriptions and action items.

• Offline Wearable: A discreet necklace device that records and processes conversations entirely offline, ensuring privacy and security without sending data to third parties.

• AI: Transcribes speech in real time, identifies key points, and generates actionable next steps for use cases like client meetings, field work, sales calls, team check-ins, and brainstorming sessions across industries from consulting to manufacturing.

The Basics

• Industry: AI, Hardware

• Headquarters: London, UK

• Year Founded: 2024

• Employee Count: 2

• Investors: Techstars, angel investors

• Amount Raised: $1M

• Business Model: B2B; $99 per unit plus $1 per 10 hours of transcription (monthly recurring)

• Early Traction: 300+ on waitlist, 45 beta testers across two enterprise pilots, average tester usage 7.2 hours per day (~2,600 hours per year)

Sponsored Content*

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

• Everyone talks about AI. Mindstream helps you actually get it.

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Upcoming Events

• Bulletpitch Boston Dinner: To kick off the fall, we’re headed to Boston to host a dinner for innovators and investors. Sign up HERE.

• Second Annual Emerging Investor Art Gala, NYC: On September 18th, we’re bring together the next generation of venture capital and growth equity investors. Sign up HERE.

Weekly Feature Continued

Due Diligence

WHAT WE LIKE

• Market Opportunity: Poor communication and lost context are persistent issues across industries, leading to inefficiency, missed opportunities, and costly rework in the business world.

• Privacy and Security Differentiator: Unlike other AI wearables, hardware-level encryption, offline-first processing, and built-in consent management create a trust moat.

• Built for Enterprises: Rice’s devices are designed specifically for organizational workflows rather than repurposed consumer hardware, such as phone-based voice notes, allowing deeper integration and adoption.

POTENTIAL RISKS

• Hardware Manufacturing and Scaling: Producing and distributing physical devices can be capital and time intensive.

• User Adoption Curve: Convincing organizations to change behavior and get employee buy-in to wearing and regularly using a device may slow initial adoption.

• Industry Difficulty: The wearable hardware space remains unproven, with consumer-focused attempts like the Humane AI Pin failing to gain traction due to poor performance, overpromising, and early discontinuation.

Founder Profile

• Anil Peri, CEO: Serial founder who built and exited his first AI company at just 19.

• Shankha Dutta, CTO: Machine learning engineer with deep technical expertise in on-device processing and systems optimized for privacy, low latency, and offline use.

Comps

• Omi: Raised $2.7M from Tim Draper. Consumer-focused AI wearable without hardware-level encryption, leaving data privacy concerns unresolved.

• Limitless: Raised $27.9M from Andreessen Horowitz. Primarily software-based meeting assistant, optimized for online settings rather than in-person interactions.

• Bee: Acquired by Amazon. Built general-purpose AI hardware, not purpose-built for conversation capture in enterprise environments.

• Friend: Raised $7.9M from Pace Capital. Social AI platform, not targeting enterprise conversation capture.

Cast Your Vote

Last Week Today

• The Results Are In: KiraGen Bio uses AI to design immune cells that can resist the defenses of solid tumors like brain, lung, and breast cancer, was favored in last week’s poll.

• Subscriber Feedback: “What’s most impressive is most cell therapies in solid tumors rely on modifying each patient’s own cells; KiraGen uses donor cells that are ready-to-use, faster to make, and cheaper to scale..”