Akshay Narisetti – Co-Founder & CEO of Pocket

Akshay Narisetti – Co-Founder & CEO of Pocket

Akshay Narisetti is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pocket, an AI hardware company building a dedicated device for capturing, understanding, and organizing real-world conversations.

Founded in 2024 and headquartered in San Francisco, Pocket combines a small physical recording device with AI-powered software that transforms conversations into transcripts, summaries, action items, follow-up emails, searchable memories, and other structured information. The company was founded by Narisetti and Gabriel Dymowski and became part of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch.

Narisetti's story is distinctive within the current AI startup landscape. He began building hardware and robotics projects at a young age, became involved in open-source robotics and AI, and later became a founding member of Omi, an open-source AI wearable and note-taking project. He eventually used that experience to build Pocket around a more focused idea: instead of asking people to open an app or wear an always-listening AI device, create a purpose-built piece of hardware that can capture conversations with a single button.

That strategy has produced extraordinary early growth.

In June 2026, Pocket announced an $11 million funding round led by Accel, with participation from Y Combinator and prominent founders and operators. By March 2026, Pocket had reached a reported $27 million annualized revenue run rate and shipped more than 35,000 devices. By August, Narisetti said the company had crossed a $100 million annualized run rate and had more than 270,000 devices in the world.

Who Is Akshay Narisetti?

Akshay Narisetti is an Indian-born technology entrepreneur, generative AI engineer, robotics enthusiast, and hardware builder who has built his career around the intersection of artificial intelligence and the physical world.

His LinkedIn profile describes him as a Generative AI Engineer and tinkerer/explorer, while his professional history shows a long-standing interest in robotics, AI, open-source software, and hardware.

Today, he is best known for Pocket, but Pocket is not his first attempt to rethink how humans interact with AI.

Before founding Pocket, Narisetti was a founding member of Omi, an open-source AI note-taking device that became one of the larger open-source AI wearable projects. That experience gave him direct exposure to the limitations of traditional note-taking applications and to the challenges of building AI-powered hardware.

At Pocket, he has taken those lessons and applied them to a more focused product designed around one central idea:

Technology should capture the conversation so people can focus on the conversation itself.

Early Interest in Robotics

Narisetti's interest in technology began unusually early.

Investment firm Level2 Ventures says he had been building hardware since he was 12 years old. His public professional profile also documents his involvement in robotics and AI communities.

His early interests were not limited to software.

He became involved in robotics competitions and open-source robotics projects, including the e-Yantra Robotics Competition organized by IIT Bombay. His LinkedIn profile records reaching the final stage of the competition twice and building robots with hardware support from IIT Bombay.

Narisetti also became involved with the open-source robotics organization JdeRobot, contributing to robotics and artificial-intelligence projects. A recommendation on his LinkedIn profile describes his work with the organization and his participation in Google Summer of Code in 2022.

This early combination of hardware, robotics, software, and AI would later become a defining characteristic of his entrepreneurial career.

From Robotics to Generative AI

Narisetti's career gradually moved from conventional robotics toward AI systems capable of understanding human language and interaction.

This transition is important because Pocket is not simply a hardware company.

The physical device is effectively an interface to a much larger AI system.

The hardware captures audio. AI models transcribe the conversation, identify speakers, understand context, generate summaries, extract tasks, and turn unstructured conversations into information that can be searched and acted upon.

Narisetti's background in both hardware and AI therefore provides a natural foundation for the company's product strategy.

Rather than treating hardware as the end product, Pocket uses hardware as the interface through which AI gains access to the real world.

The Omi Experience

Before Pocket, Narisetti was a founding member of Omi, an open-source AI wearable and note-taking platform.

Omi became known for experimenting with wearable AI capable of capturing conversations and providing users with AI-generated memories and information.

Narisetti also built applications for the Omi ecosystem. Its public app marketplace lists applications created by him, including tools for structured medical and psychotherapy notes.

This experience helped expose Narisetti to a fundamental problem with AI assistants:

AI can be extremely powerful once it has context, but obtaining useful context from everyday life is difficult.

Most digital information is generated through screens, applications, documents, and typed messages. Human beings, however, spend much of their time communicating through physical conversations.

That observation became central to Pocket.

Founding Pocket

Narisetti and Gabriel Dymowski founded Pocket in late 2024.

The founders initially recognized a gap in the rapidly expanding AI meeting-notetaker market.

There were already numerous applications capable of transcribing Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls.

But in-person conversations were different.

A meeting in a conference room, a conversation with a doctor, a client dinner, an investor meeting, a phone call, or a spontaneous idea could not easily be captured by conventional meeting software.

The founders' conclusion was simple:

The real world needed its own AI note-taking device.

Y Combinator describes Pocket as a small device with three microphones and a single primary recording action. Users press the button, have their conversation, and later receive a transcript, summary, and extracted action items through the Pocket application.

Why Pocket Uses Hardware

The decision to build hardware rather than another mobile application is central to Narisetti's strategy.

Phones already contain microphones and sophisticated AI applications.

But using a phone to take notes introduces friction.

Users need to unlock the device, open an application, find the correct recording mode, and manage the device during a conversation.

Narisetti and Dymowski instead wanted the recording process to disappear into the background.

Pocket can be attached to the back of a smartphone or used independently. The device is designed to make recording a deliberate, visible action while allowing the user to remain focused on the conversation.

The result is a product positioned somewhere between a voice recorder, AI assistant, memory system, and productivity tool.

What Does Pocket Do?

Pocket is designed to capture conversations and transform them into structured information.

Its capabilities include:

• Real-time or post-conversation transcription

• Speaker identification

• AI-generated summaries

• Action-item extraction

• Searchable conversation history

• Mind maps

• Follow-up email generation

• Conversation-based insights

• Phone-call recording and summarization

• Integrations with productivity and AI tools

Pocket's enterprise offering also includes workflow management, webhooks, and integrations with services including Google Calendar, OneDrive, Google Drive, Obsidian, Claude, and Cursor. The company has also introduced an MCP server for connecting Pocket's AI capabilities with external databases and systems.

This positions Pocket as more than an electronic recorder.

The company's broader ambition is to create a persistent AI memory layer around real-world interactions.

"Take Notes in the Real World"

Pocket's positioning is summarized by its tagline:

"Take Notes in the Real World."

The idea is straightforward.

Most AI meeting assistants were originally designed around online meetings.

But the physical world remains full of important conversations.

A physician speaks with a patient.

A salesperson meets a customer.

An attorney speaks with a client.

An executive has an impromptu discussion.

An engineer brainstorms with a colleague.

A student attends a lecture.

These conversations contain information that can later become decisions, tasks, insights, or memories.

Pocket attempts to capture that information without requiring users to manually write it down.

Y Combinator describes the company's objective as allowing people to talk and remain present rather than typing or taking notes during the interaction.

The Product Launch

Pocket's product began attracting attention before its formal launch.

The company released an early concept that generated thousands of pre-orders, helping demonstrate demand before the company had reached significant scale.

Pocket officially launched in 2025 and began shipping devices to customers.

The company says it shipped more than 10,000 devices on launch day, according to its June 2026 funding announcement.

That early demand gave Narisetti and his team an unusually strong starting point for an AI hardware company.

Hardware startups traditionally face significant challenges around manufacturing, inventory, supply chains, quality control, and distribution.

Pocket's early traction suggested that the market was willing to pay for a dedicated AI device rather than relying exclusively on software.

Joining Y Combinator

Pocket became part of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch.

The company entered YC with Narisetti as Co-Founder and CEO and Dymowski as Co-Founder. YC describes Pocket as a premium hardware-and-software company in the AI voice-recorder space and says the company was scaling rapidly in the United States and Europe.

The YC association also placed Pocket alongside a new generation of startups exploring physical interfaces for artificial intelligence.

For Narisetti, YC provided access to a global founder network while Pocket was already moving rapidly from prototype toward mass-market distribution.

Pocket's $11 Million Funding Round

In June 2026, Pocket announced an $11 million funding round led by Accel, with participation from Y Combinator and other prominent technology founders, CEOs, and operators.

Investors included Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel; Mati Staniszewski, co-founder of ElevenLabs; and Kaz Nejatian, CEO of Opendoor and former Shopify COO.

The funding was intended to support hiring, particularly in design and engineering, while enabling Pocket to explore additional hardware form factors and expand its product platform.

The round also provided validation for Narisetti's thesis that AI hardware could become a meaningful category rather than a short-lived novelty.

Rapid Revenue Growth

Pocket's growth accelerated dramatically during 2026.

Accel reported that by March 2026, the company had achieved a $27 million annualized revenue run rate and shipped more than 35,000 devices.

By August 2026, Narisetti reported that Pocket had crossed a $100 million annualized run rate, with more than 270,000 devices in the world.

Business Insider separately reported that Pocket had surpassed a $100 million run rate roughly eight months after launch, with monthly growth around 50% and more than 200,000 devices sold at the time of its August report.

It is important to distinguish annualized run rate from actual annual revenue.

A $100 million run rate means that the company's current revenue pace, if maintained for a full year, would equal approximately $100 million. It does not mean Pocket generated $100 million in trailing twelve-month revenue.

Narisetti has specifically said he prefers the run-rate metric because AI subscription and token-related revenue can be difficult to characterize as traditional recurring revenue.

The Business Model

Pocket combines hardware sales with recurring software subscriptions.

The physical device provides the interface for capturing conversations, while premium AI features generate ongoing subscription revenue.

This creates a potentially attractive hardware-plus-software model.

Hardware gives Pocket an opportunity to acquire customers through a tangible product, while subscriptions can create recurring revenue after the initial purchase.

Business Insider reported in August 2026 that Pocket's hardware was priced from approximately $129, with premium AI plans starting at around $16.59 per month.

The combination creates an important strategic advantage if Pocket can maintain customer engagement after the initial hardware purchase.

Why Pocket Is Different From AI Meeting Software

The competitive landscape around AI note-taking is crowded.

Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and numerous startups already provide AI-powered meeting transcription and summaries.

Narisetti's response is to focus on the conversations that happen outside those platforms.

Pocket does not require the conversation to take place inside a particular video-conferencing system.

That means it can potentially operate across:

• In-person meetings

• Phone calls

• Client visits

• Medical appointments

• Interviews

• Sales meetings

• Conferences

• Classrooms

• Informal conversations

• Personal brainstorming

TechCrunch reported that Narisetti believes real-world conversations contain important context that conventional online meeting systems do not capture.

Privacy and Recording Challenges

AI recording devices inevitably raise privacy and consent questions.

Pocket operates in an environment where people may be uncomfortable with the possibility of conversations being recorded.

Narisetti has argued that Pocket's visible, manually activated design provides an important distinction from devices that continuously listen in the background.

Business Insider reported that Narisetti emphasized that Pocket needs to be placed visibly and requires the user to press a button before recording.

Nevertheless, privacy and recording laws remain an important consideration as Pocket expands internationally.

Different jurisdictions have different rules governing consent to audio recording, and enterprise customers may impose additional privacy requirements.

Managing these issues responsibly will be an important part of Pocket's long-term growth.

Pocket's Enterprise Opportunity

Although Pocket initially gained traction with individual consumers, enterprise applications could become an important component of its future.

Potential professional use cases include:

• Sales representatives

• Doctors

• Lawyers

• Consultants

• Recruiters

• Real-estate professionals

• Customer-success teams

• Field workers

• Executives

• Researchers

The value proposition is particularly strong for professionals who have many conversations every day but cannot continuously type notes.

Pocket's enterprise infrastructure—including webhooks and integrations—suggests that the company is moving beyond simple transcription toward workflow automation.

The long-term opportunity is therefore not merely to remember conversations.

It is to turn conversations into actions inside business systems.

From Notes to AI Memory

The deeper thesis behind Pocket is the idea of an AI-powered memory layer.

Traditional productivity software stores information that users deliberately enter.

Pocket reverses the process.

Instead of requiring users to remember what is important and then record it, the device attempts to capture the conversation first and let AI determine what matters afterward.

This could allow the system to answer questions such as:

• What did this customer ask for?

• What did we agree to?

• Who was responsible for the next step?

• What did the doctor say?

• What did the investor recommend?

• What was the idea I had last Tuesday?

• What commitments did I make during today's meetings?

That turns Pocket from a notetaker into something closer to a personal AI memory system.

Narisetti's Product Philosophy

Narisetti's approach to product development appears highly influenced by his hardware background.

Pocket's team has emphasized design, simplicity, and the end-to-end experience.

Accel described the founders as having a strong point of view from the beginning about building something elegant, functional, and unobtrusive. The investor also highlighted the team's attention to design, packaging, software, summaries, and the overall customer experience.

This is important because AI hardware has historically struggled with consumer expectations.

A technically impressive device can still fail if it is uncomfortable, unreliable, unattractive, or difficult to use.

Narisetti appears to be approaching the problem as a consumer-product founder rather than simply as an AI engineer.

A Hardware-First AI Strategy

Narisetti's career illustrates a broader trend in artificial intelligence.

For much of the generative-AI boom, the dominant interface was the screen.

Users interacted with AI through chat windows, APIs, websites, and mobile applications.

Narisetti is betting that the next stage of AI will increasingly involve physical interfaces.

A device that can hear, understand, remember, and eventually act on information from the physical world could give AI access to a much larger portion of human activity.

Pocket is an early example of that strategy.

Building a Company Around Speed

Pocket's rapid growth has also influenced how Narisetti describes the company.

Y Combinator says the team is focused on quality and speed, while Narisetti has publicly emphasized how quickly the company moved from a very small team to shipping hundreds of thousands of devices.

This speed is particularly notable in hardware.

Software companies can deploy an update instantly.

Hardware companies must design, manufacture, test, ship, support, and replace physical products.

Pocket's ability to scale its physical distribution while simultaneously improving its AI software is therefore one of the most important aspects of Narisetti's execution.

Challenges Ahead

Despite its impressive growth, Pocket faces several significant challenges.

Competition

Large technology companies already offer AI meeting transcription and summarization.

Google, Microsoft, Zoom, and other major platforms can potentially integrate similar functionality directly into products that customers already use.

Hardware Economics

Scaling hardware production requires careful management of manufacturing, inventory, logistics, warranty replacements, and component costs.

Privacy

Recording real-world conversations introduces legal and social challenges that software-only meeting assistants can sometimes avoid.

AI Commoditization

Transcription and summarization are increasingly commoditized.

Pocket therefore needs to build defensibility around its hardware, data, user experience, integrations, workflow automation, and brand.

Customer Retention

Rapid hardware sales are valuable, but the long-term economics of the business depend heavily on continued software engagement and subscription adoption.

International Expansion

Pocket has begun expanding beyond the United States, but international growth introduces additional regulatory, privacy, localization, manufacturing, and distribution challenges.

The Road Ahead

Narisetti has indicated that Pocket intends to expand beyond its initial core use case.

The company is exploring new hardware form factors and additional applications for the device, including personal note-taking and dictation.

That expansion could significantly increase Pocket's addressable market.

Instead of being positioned exclusively as a meeting recorder, Pocket could become a general-purpose AI interface for capturing thoughts, conversations, tasks, and information throughout the day.

The company's challenge will be maintaining its simple user experience while adding increasingly sophisticated AI capabilities.

Why Akshay Narisetti Matters

Akshay Narisetti is part of a new generation of founders treating AI hardware as a serious computing category.

His career has progressed through a distinctive sequence:

Robotics → Open Source → AI Wearables → Generative AI → AI Hardware

That background helps explain why Pocket is not simply another AI application.

Narisetti believes that AI needs access to the physical world and that hardware can provide the bridge.

Pocket's early results suggest that there is significant consumer and professional demand for this idea.

The company raised $11 million in 2026, reached a reported $27 million annualized revenue run rate by March, and subsequently reported a $100 million annualized run rate and more than 270,000 devices in circulation.

Those numbers do not guarantee long-term success. AI hardware has already produced several highly publicized failures.

But Pocket's combination of a relatively simple product, clear use case, recurring software revenue, and rapid distribution makes Narisetti one of the more interesting young CEOs in the emerging AI-device market.

His bigger bet is that the future of AI will not live entirely inside computers and phones.

It will increasingly exist in the physical world around us.

Key Facts About Akshay Narisetti

Category	Details
Full Name	Akshay Narisetti
Current Role	Co-Founder & CEO, Pocket
Company	Pocket / Open Vision Engineering
Industry	AI Hardware, Consumer Electronics, Artificial Intelligence
Headquarters	San Francisco, California
Founded Pocket	2024
Y Combinator	Winter 2026
Co-Founder	Gabriel Dymowski
Previous Venture	Omi
Technical Background	Generative AI, robotics, hardware
Early Interest	Robotics and hardware from childhood
Major Funding	$11M seed round in June 2026
Lead Investor	Accel
Reported March 2026 Run Rate	$27M annualized
Reported August 2026 Run Rate	$100M annualized
Devices	270,000+ reported by September 2026
Core Product	AI device for real-world conversations
Business Model	Hardware + AI subscriptions
Primary Market	Consumers and professionals
Strategic Focus	AI memory, real-world conversations and workflow automation

 Summary

Akshay Narisetti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pocket, a San Francisco-based AI hardware company building dedicated devices for capturing and understanding real-world conversations.

A robotics and generative-AI engineer by background, Narisetti began building hardware at a young age and later became a founding member of Omi, one of the largest open-source AI note-taking device projects. He and Gabriel Dymowski founded Pocket in 2024 after identifying a gap in the AI meeting-assistant market: most existing products were designed for online meetings, while some of the most important conversations happen offline.

Pocket's solution is a compact device that captures conversations and uses AI to produce transcripts, summaries, action items, searchable memories, and workflow outputs.

The company's early growth has been remarkable. Pocket raised $11 million in June 2026, reached a reported $27 million annualized revenue run rate by March, and subsequently crossed a reported $100 million annualized run rate while distributing hundreds of thousands of devices.

Narisetti's larger vision extends beyond meeting notes. By combining dedicated hardware with generative AI, Pocket is attempting to create a new interface between people and artificial intelligence—one capable of capturing the conversations, ideas, and context that exist outside traditional screens.

If the company can maintain its rapid growth while overcoming competition, privacy concerns, hardware complexity, and the commoditization of AI transcription, Akshay Narisetti could become one of the notable founders shaping the next generation of consumer AI hardware.