Nothing, the young tech brand founded by Carl Pei, is no longer satisfied with being just another smartphone company. In a recent announcement, Pei revealed that Nothing has secured $200 million in fresh funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $1.3 billion. 
But beyond the financial headlines, the message was clear: the future of Nothing extends far beyond phones. Robots, electric vehicles, and AI-native operating systems are all on the horizon.
Four years after its creation, Nothing has built a global manufacturing network, shipped millions of units, and passed $1 billion in sales. That would already be a milestone for any startup, but Pei insists that this is just the foundation. He argues that the next era of technology is about the seamless convergence of software and hardware – merging into what he calls an AI-native platform designed to adapt to each individual user.
“From being the only independent smartphone company to emerge in the last decade, towards building an AI-native platform in which hardware and software converge into a single intelligent system,” Pei declared in September 2025. In other words, Nothing wants to move beyond the generic smartphone experience that has dominated the last ten years and create a model where every user gets a truly personal operating system.
That vision springs from a critique of the industry itself. While AI has accelerated rapidly, Pei argues that the smartphone has remained largely stagnant, evolving in camera quality and translation apps but offering little beyond incremental improvements. Nothing believes the traditional one-size-fits-all model of operating systems no longer works in an era when technology could be customized to anticipate personal needs.
Instead, the company imagines a future where digital assistants act as agents that not only suggest but also execute tasks once intent is confirmed. That could mean scheduling appointments, filtering information, or even managing everyday chores across devices. In Pei’s words: “Unlike today’s one-size-fits-all solution, a billion different operating systems will be rendered for a billion different people.”
What makes this more than marketing talk is the scope of ambition. Nothing envisions its AI-driven OS running not only on phones and earbuds but extending across watches, glasses, humanoid robots, and even electric cars. By controlling the last-mile interface – where hardware interacts directly with the user – the company believes it has the leverage to shape how AI personalization unfolds in the coming decade.
It’s a bold idea, perhaps even audacious, considering that larger rivals like Apple, Google, and Samsung are all racing toward similar AI-first ecosystems. Yet, as the last decade showed, disruptors can emerge from unexpected places. Nothing’s promise of AI-native devices could introduce the kind of radical rethink that personal technology has lacked since the original iPhone.
Still, skeptics point out that ambitious visions don’t always translate into successful products. The next few years will determine whether Nothing’s philosophy becomes a genuine paradigm shift or just another bold pitch. And if humanoid robots really are part of the future, society may soon need to dust off Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics to keep up.