A year after multiple publications reported Jony Ive was collaborating with Sam Altman on a hardware project, Ive himself as confirmed it in a profile in the New York Times.
There aren’t a lot of details. He met Altman through Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, and the project is being funded by Ive and the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs company. The New York Times claims it could raise $1 billion in funding by the end of the year. There was no mention of Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank CEO rumored last year to have invested a $1 billion in the project.
The project only has 10 employees currently, but they include Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, two key people who worked with Ive on the iPhone. As for the device itself? Last year it was…