Caine Ardayfio, an African American tech entrepreneur, left Harvard College to focus full-time on Mira, a wearable technology startup co-founded with classmate AnhPhu Nguyen. The venture recently closed a seed round led by venture firm General Catalyst, with participation from investors including Naval Ravikant, Pillar VC, Village Global, Morningside Ventures and Soma Capital.
Ardayfio began coding in middle school after his father introduced him to programming. In high school he launched a mental-health startup inspired by his sister, raising about $100,000 and building an early team — an experience he credits with giving him entrepreneurial confidence.
At Harvard, Ardayfio and Nguyen bonded over projects in the campus makerspace. Their early experiments — from robotic tentacles to smart glasses prototypes that drew more than 80 million views online — laid the foundation for Mira’s vision of wearable AI.
Mira’s smart glasses are audio-first, capturing conversations without video and using embedded AI to transcribe dialogue in real time, translate more than 60 languages, perform instant calculations and surface contextual information during meetings. Only text transcripts are stored on the paired smartphone app; raw audio is immediately deleted, the company says.
“We want to bring AI closer to daily life — it becomes like a system that’s with you 24/7,” Ardayfio told AfroTech in a recent interview. Early adopters include business leaders and executives using the glasses to track and recall details from conversations, with plans to expand into calendar and email integration.
The funding will support further software and machine learning development, improve the hardware, and scale the team as Mira prepares to grow beyond its initial batch of 300 units and plans production of many more. The co-founders hope to reach 1 million users within three years.
Ardayfio and Nguyen first came to public attention in 2024 with a controversial viral project demonstrating how smart glasses hooked to facial recognition tools could identify and retrieve personal data about strangers. That demo sparked a broader debate about privacy and surveillance — a backdrop that underscores the broader stakes of wearable AI.
While Mira’s devices avoid cameras and emphasize real-time AI assistance, the journey from viral campaign to venture capital-backed startup highlights both the opportunities and challenges for emerging wearable technology in a society grappling with privacy, ethics and human-machine interaction.
