Post by True Ventures

Most AI products are getting better at answers. The harder problem is access. When and how do you actually use it? In the early days of AI, interacting with it still looked the same: typing a prompt into a box, or speaking a command into your phone. For something so personal, it felt surprisingly public and often interruptive. That friction shows up in small, everyday moments. You’re mid-conversation. Walking down the street. Sitting in a meeting. You could use AI, but the interface gets in the way. Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong kept coming back to that pattern. People don’t avoid AI because it isn’t useful. They avoid it in moments where interacting with it feels unnatural. Typing mid-thought. Speaking commands out loud in public. Pulling out a device just to ask a quick question. So they started with a different question: What would it look like to interact with AI quietly? That question led to Sandbar. At the center is a wearable ring: a system designed for subtle, continuous interaction. It can pick up whispered input close to the hand, interpret touch and finger gestures, and connect those signals directly to AI. No screen required. No need to break the moment you’re in. The idea isn’t to make AI louder or more visible. It’s the opposite. As AI becomes more capable, and more present, the interface starts to matter more than the model itself. The bottleneck shifts from what AI can do to how naturally we can access it. That’s the shift Sandbar is building toward: AI that fits into how people already think, move, and behave. Not something you have to stop and use. Something that’s simply there when you need it.