A card-sized AI-native device and service for the 2.7 billion people who work away from a desk.

In one paragraph

Where this actually stands.

chit is a $129 machined-aluminium card with one button. Press it, talk, and chit turns what was said into records, expenses, calendar events and follow-ups — interpreted through who you are and what you do. Two SKUs are in production artwork, the tooling is ours, and physical units exist. The software is a live iOS app. The store is built and verified end to end through Stripe, in sandbox; live payments switch on when we claim the resource, so nothing has been charged and chit is pre-revenue. Twenty co-branded devices are specified and connected to Flexbone's own VPC, and Flexbone's CEO will take a reference call. We hold four signed letters of intent covering 285 units — one of them a company a founder owns, disclosed below — before spending a dollar on acquisition. The company is a Delaware C-Corp with no outside capital and no prior instruments, and the founders have put in $10,000 of their own; we are raising $200,000 on a post-money SAFE at a $4M cap to fund the first production run and three revenue-share channel pilots.

285

units of verbal interest

unsigned · 70% one customer

4

signed LOIs

non-binding · one related party

20

devices branded and connected

Flexbone

$0

revenue

pre-revenue, and pre-launch

Traction

What is actually true today.

In the order a sceptic should read it: what is deployed, what is signed, what is only spoken, and what is built.

Deployed

Twenty co-branded chit devices with Flexbone Solutions — specified, branded as Flexbone's own, and connected to Flexbone's VPC. The architecture is live; we are not claiming twenty people in daily field use, because we have not measured it.

Signed

Four executed letters of intent — Flexbone Solutions (healthcare AI), Triple C (logistics, a related party: a founder owns it), Magnetism Motors (automotive retail) and Stuart Pro HVAC (trades). All non-binding. Executed copies available on request.

Spoken

285 units of verbal interest across those four operators. No purchase orders. No deposits. The per-organisation split, the customer concentration inside it and the related-party share are all set out in the demand section below.

Built — hardware

chit one and chit one Pro in production artwork with the factory as of July 2026, drawn 1:1. Physical units exist and have been photographed for the store.

Built — software

A live iOS application: recording, transcription, context-framed summaries, the daily brief, search across everything captured, calendar and mail connections, and export to plain text and markdown. The founders' own status line is “software done, production units inbound.”

Commerce

hichit.com configures and buychit.com charges — a real Stripe Checkout session with the device as a one-time line and the $9 membership as a subscription trialing fourteen days. Built, deployed and verified end to end in Stripe's sandbox with a test card: $129 collected, subscription trialing, US shipping captured. Live payments switch on when the Stripe resource is claimed; that has not happened yet, so no real card has been charged.

Revenue

Zero. chit is pre-revenue: no customer has been charged, because live payments are not switched on yet. Every dollar spent to date has been the founders' own.

Waitlist

There isn't one. An early version of the site had a waitlist form; it came out when the storefront was rebuilt, and the database behind it was never connected. So there is no signup list to quote and no email list behind it — the 285 units below came out of conversations, not a form. The store takes real orders instead, which is the number that will matter once live payments are on.

Demand

285 units, before we started.

285

units of verbal interest across four operators, ahead of launch, with no acquisition spend

Where the interest sits

Flexbone SolutionsHealthcare AI — MSPs and NPs · Rollout over a year, contingent on this round

200

Triple CLogistics — related party · Drivers first, then brokers

50

Stuart Pro HVACHVAC and trades · On-site employees

25

Magnetism MotorsAutomotive retail · Sales agents and floor manager

10

Two things to read off that table rather than discover later. First, concentration: 200 of the 285 units — 70% — are one customer, and that customer's rollout is explicitly contingent on this round funding it. Second, relation: Triple C is the carrier one of the founders owns and operates, so 50 of those units are a related party and should be discounted accordingly. Excluding both, arm's-length third-party interest is 35 units.

Letters of intent

Four signed. All non-binding. One is a related party.

Summaries below. Executed copies are available on request — we do not publish a counterparty's signed letter on a page they did not agree to appear on, and neither should anyone else.

• Flexbone Solutions

  Healthcare AI · flexbone.ai · Non-binding

  What is in place

  Twenty co-branded chit devices, specified and branded as Flexbone's own hardware, connected to Flexbone's own VPC so audio, transcripts and briefs stay in their cloud. The letter looks past those twenty to roughly 200 units across their MSPs and nurse practitioners, rolled out over a year — a rollout that needs this round to execute.

  Units

  20 specified and connected · ~200 intended

  What the letter says

  Executed 29 July 2026, signed by Sayem Hoque, CEO. Flexbone will take a reference call and has agreed we may quote them.

• Triple C

  Logistics · RELATED PARTY · Non-binding · related party

  The disclosure first

  Triple C is the hundred-plus-truck carrier that co-founder Ahmad Agad owns and operates. This letter is therefore a founder's own company signing with chit. We put it on the page because it is real distribution into a launch vertical and because leaving it off would be worse — but it is not arm's-length validation, and no investor should read it as such. The use is drivers first, capturing what happens on a run, then expanding to the brokers Triple C works with.

  Units

  50 devices

  What the letter says

  Executed copy available on request. Treat the commercial terms as related-party terms; they were not negotiated at arm's length.

• Magnetism Motors

  Automotive retail · Non-binding

  What they want it for

  Ten devices: sales agents carry one on test drives so what was said in the car survives the drive, and the manager reads sentiment across the floor from the captures rather than from the CRM. Dealership conversations are where the deal actually happens and where the CRM is blindest — and one of the founders operates an independent dealership, so this is a vertical we know from the inside.

  Units

  10 devices

  What the letter says

  Executed copy available on request.

• Stuart Pro HVAC

  HVAC and trades · Non-binding

  What they want it for

  Twenty-five units across their on-site employees, to track the day and the meetings in it. An HVAC tech runs six to eight residential calls a day and says the quote out loud at the unit — the diagnosis walkthrough, the repair-versus-replace approval, the parts needed, the callback note. chit turns that into the ticket before they leave the driveway and gives the operator approval recordings that end he-said/she-said invoice disputes.

  Units

  25 devices

  What the letter says

  Executed copy available on request.

A letter of intent is a statement of interest, not a contract. None of these obligate the counterparty to buy anything, and none should be read as booked revenue.

Case study

Flexbone put their name on our card.

The clearest evidence that the enterprise motion is real: a company that took our hardware, branded it as their own, and pointed it at their own cloud. What it has not yet done is generate revenue — that is stated below rather than buried.

Who they are

Flexbone Solutions (flexbone.ai) is an AI company working with healthcare customers. Their teams sit in rooms with those customers and the substance of the engagement — what was asked, what was promised, what was decided — lives in conversation.

The problem they had

Notes taken after the fact are the notes someone remembered, not the ones that were said. Across a team and a customer base, that is a compounding loss: nobody has a reliable picture of what is actually happening in the rooms, and the detail that mattered is gone by the time anyone needs it.

What is in place

Twenty chit devices specified and branded as Flexbone's own hardware rather than ours, and connected to their environment. One button, in the room, no laptop open and no app to launch mid-conversation. The letter looks past those twenty to roughly 200 units across their MSPs and nurse practitioners over a year.

Where the data lives

Every capture lands in Flexbone's own VPC. The audio, the transcripts and the briefs stay in their cloud — we do not hold them. The intelligence layer is customised to their operation rather than the consumer default, so the same sentence is read the way Flexbone's business reads it.

What it does for them

Their teams track notes across healthcare customers and pull data insights out of what was actually said in the room, rather than out of what someone typed up afterwards.

20

devices branded and connected

~200

units the letter intends, over a year

Their VPC

where every capture lives

Product

What is built, and what is not.

Hardware

chit one

53.9 × 86 × 3.9 mm, machined aluminium, ID-1 card footprint. $129.

chit one Pro

57.9 × 88.1 × 6.7 mm, diamond-cut faceted face. $179.

Finish

One: bead-blasted natural anodised aluminium. Confirmed against photographs of the physical unit.

Factory

Deliberately not named here. The manufacturing partner is not disclosed in anything shared over an open link — this page included — because that relationship is the one piece of this business a competitor could act on directly. Named under NDA, on request, in a conversation.

Evidence of the relationship

Both SKUs exist as 1:1 manufacturing drawings from the partner and as physical units — the photography across hichit.com is of the real M5, not a render.

Tooling

Owned by chit. The tooling is ours, not the manufacturing partner's, so the SKUs move if the relationship does.

Lead time

Built to order today, at roughly three weeks from order to delivery — the figure the store quotes to customers — and expected to come down as volume rises. Pending confirmation against a production run rather than samples.

Software

• Recording and transcription (Deepgram today)
• Context-framed summaries — set at first open, per person and per trade
• The daily brief: the day gathered into one page
• Calendar connections — Google, Zoom, Teams
• Mail connections and drafted follow-ups
• Search across everything captured
• Export to plain text and markdown

Each of those was confirmed by the founders against the build on 29 July 2026: the daily brief is built; calendar covers Google, Zoom and Teams plus custom integrations; mail covers all providers; capture is button-only with no wake word and no always-on microphone; and search across everything captured is included in the $9 rather than an upsell.

Model-agnostic by design: transcription runs on Deepgram today and the architecture is BYOM, so an enterprise can bring its own model. The enterprise deployment puts capture, transcripts and briefs in the customer's own VPC — GCP, AWS or Azure.

This is a live iOS application, not a clickable prototype — the list above is what runs in it. Android is not built.

Recording, consent and privacy

chit has no wake word and no always-on microphone — the firmware cannot record without the button being pressed. That is a deliberate design decision and it is also the single biggest regulatory difference between chit and an always-listening wearable.

Unit economics

The device is profitable on day one.

chit is not a razor-and-blades business. The hardware carries a real margin before the membership is counted, so the $9 is upside rather than recovery of a subsidised device. That is a materially different risk profile from a hardware company that has to keep a customer eighteen months to break even.

Per device

chit one — retail

$129

chit one — landed cost

$65factory price, freight, duty and packaging, per unit

chit one — gross margin

$64 · 49.6%our arithmetic on the two figures above

chit one Pro — retail

$179

chit one Pro — landed cost

$85the larger body and the machined faceted face; not the same unit as the M5

chit one Pro — gross margin

$94 · 52.5%our arithmetic — the Pro is the better-margin SKU, not just the dearer one

Per membership

Price

$9 per month · $108 per year

Cost to serve

$4 per monthtranscription, inference and storage for one active member

Membership margin

$5 per month · 56%our arithmetic on the two figures above — $60 a year per attached member

Attach assumption

~50%Plaud's own reported benchmark, not our forecast

Sources: TechCrunch · Jun 2026 — Plaud ~50% attach

Use of funds

$200,000. Six months.

Go to market

$100,00050%

Channel partner pilots, vertical onboarding, the per-industry use-case work that makes each channel win compound.

Production run

$40,00020%

First run of 100 units, plus tooling, certification and packaging.

Buffer

$40,00020%

Unallocated. Hardware timelines slip and this is the line that absorbs it.

Software

$20,00010%

Infrastructure, transcription and inference cost, and the enterprise VPC deployment work.

Six months of program spend — not six months of payroll.

The founders have put in $10,000 of their own money to date. That is the whole of the outside-and-inside capital in this business. Once the round lands the program runs at roughly $33,000 a month across the four lines above for six months — still no payroll, so that figure is spend, not salary.

What the money buys

• First 100 units shipped
• 3 revenue-share channel partners live
• Attach rate measured against Plaud's reported ~50% benchmark
• First membership ARR on the books

The plan

From tooling to trades in twelve months.

Q3 2026

Production run #1 · hero film · round closes

Q4 2026

Launch: DTC through hichit.com, first three revenue-share channel pilots live

H1 2027

Enterprise pilots — per-company apps and VPC deployments; attach measured against the ~50% benchmark

H2 2027

Scale the verticals that worked; seed round or profitability

The round

Post-money SAFE, $4M cap.

Raising

$200,000

For

5%

Instrument

Post-money SAFE, $4M cap

Valuation

$4M post-money

Prior capital

None. No outside capital has ever been taken — no notes, no SAFEs, no angel money, no grants. Every dollar spent has been the founders' own.

Committed so far

Nothing yet. The round is open and this is the first material it is being shown against. Applications are in with Forum Ventures and Overline — Overline passed on the written application and then took a meeting for 18 August after the founders replied.

Target close

Q3 2026, alongside the first production run.

Discount

None. The $4M cap is the economics; there is no separate discount stacked on top of it.

Paper

The standard Y Combinator post-money SAFE, unamended. It is drafted and ready to send.

Cap table

Two founders, no outside capital, no prior instruments. There are no notes or SAFEs outstanding, no option pool has been created, and no advisor, contractor or early helper holds or is owed equity. This SAFE would be the first instrument on the cap table.

Ahmad Agad

51%

Co-founder

Shafay Ahmed

49%

Co-founder

Option pool

—

None created

Outside holders

—

None

Corporate

Entity

chit — a Delaware C-Corporation, based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Incorporated

Openthe date of incorporation. The entity, state and form are settled and the formation documents can be sent; only the date is missing here, and it is one line.

Structure

The form a post-money SAFE assumes, so there is no conversion to do before anyone can wire.

IP assignment

Done, in writing. The designs, firmware and code are assigned to the company — which matters more here than usual, because one founder is a full-time Microsoft employee and the other runs a separate operating company.

Founder vesting

None today. The founders' stock is not on a vesting schedule and no 83(b) election was filed. We would expect a first institutional investor to require standard four-year vesting with a one-year cliff as a condition of closing, and we are not going to argue about it. Stated here rather than found later.

IP filings

None. No provisionals, no design patents, no trademark applications. The moat is the compounding context, the channel and the VPC deployment — not a filing we do not have.

Formation documents

Certificate of incorporation and bylaws exist and are available on request.

Team

We sell AI to the Fortune 500 by day — and run blue-collar businesses ourselves.

Shafay Ahmed

Co-founder · GitHub (Microsoft) · Georgia Tech CS

Senior Solutions Engineer at GitHub, on enterprise strategic accounts across Copilot, Advanced Security and Agent HQ; previously forward-deployed at Aisera and Couchbase. Serial builder — Keelway (freight TMS), TestDrivePro (dealership SaaS with paying customers) — and operator of an independent car dealership, which is exactly the customer chit serves.

Ahmad Agad

Co-founder · Keelway · Georgia Tech CS

Co-founder of Keelway. Owner-operator of Triple C, a carrier running over a hundred trucks — inside trucking, one of chit's launch verticals, every day.

Founder–market fit is not a slide claim here. We are the ICP.

Hiring

The round does not fund headcount. The 20 / 50 / 10 / 20 split above carries no salary line — it is a production run, channel pilots and infrastructure. The founders are not paying themselves out of it.

Advisors

No formal advisors and no advisor equity outstanding. The LOI partners — Flexbone, Magnetism Motors, Stuart Pro — function as the operating brain trust instead, which is the arrangement the founders have described to funds.

Market

The deskless majority.

The full market case is in the deck. In brief: roughly 2.7 billion people — about 80% of the global workforce — work away from a desk, and the entire meeting-transcription stack assumes a calendar, a desk and a laptop. Bottom-up on US trades and field service alone: 12.5 million workers × ($129 device + ~50% attach × $108/yr) ≈ $2.3B serviceable per year, with trucking, dealerships and 1099 owners on top of that number rather than inside it.

Price anchors: Sandbar Stream is $249–299 plus $10/mo, Plaud runs $159–189 plus $8.33–19.99/mo. chit undercuts on the device at $129 and simplifies the service to one $9 plan.

The full market build-up, with sources, is slides 8 and 9 of the deck. invest.hichit.com

Sources: Emergence Capital — deskless workforce · BLS OEWS · May 2025 · TechCrunch · Jun 2026 — Plaud attach

Risks

What could go wrong.

Every one of these will come up in diligence. We would rather they came up here.

1. 01

   The verbal interest does not convert

   285 units of unsigned interest is the strongest number on this page and the softest. Nothing is committed, and pre-launch hardware interest converts at a rate nobody — including us — can currently quote. The first production run is sized at 100 partly to find out.

2. 02

   Certification and the shipping date

   A Bluetooth device with a radio needs FCC and Bluetooth SIG certification before it can legally ship in the US, and certification is the item that most often moves a hardware launch by a quarter. We will walk through where ours stands on a call.

3. 03

   Manufacturing concentration and tariffs

   A single contract manufacturer and a US tariff regime that has moved repeatedly on China-manufactured electronics are both live exposures on a $65 landed cost. A tariff move eats hardware margin directly.

4. 04

   Recording law

   Roughly a dozen US states require all-party consent to record a conversation. chit's press-to-record design is a better starting position than an always-on wearable, but it is a starting position, not an answer. See the product section.

5. 05

   The form factor is replicable

   36Kr's own read on Plaud is that its form is easily replicable, and the same is true of ours. The defensible layer is everything the device feeds — compounding context, channel distribution, VPC enterprise deployment, BYOM — not the aluminium.

6. 06

   Concentration, and a related party

   200 of the 285 units of interest are one customer, whose rollout is contingent on this round funding it, and 50 more are a company a founder owns. Arm's-length third-party interest is 35 units. The full split is in the demand section rather than buried here.

7. 07

   Founder time

   Both founders currently run other things. That is the source of the founder–market fit and it is also a real execution risk. See the team section.

8. 08

   Founder stock is unvested

   There is no vesting schedule on the founders' stock and no 83(b) was filed. We expect a first institutional cheque to put standard vesting in place as a closing condition, and we would agree to it — but as things stand today it is a gap, and it is on the page rather than in a data-request reply.

9. 09

   A platform decides to build it

   OpenAI has confirmed a family of devices and Amazon bought Bee. Our answer is that every funded player is building for the meeting-heavy desk worker, and the deskless majority has no incumbent — but a platform entering the vertical is a real tail risk and not one we can price.

Sources: 36Kr · May 2026 · The Next Web · Jul 2026 — OpenAI devices · TechCrunch · Jul 2025 — Amazon acquires Bee

Documents

Available on request.

Everything below exists and will be sent to anyone in an active conversation. Ask by email and it comes back the same day.

Executed letters of intent

All four — Flexbone, Triple C, Magnetism Motors, Stuart Pro HVAC. Full signed copies.

A reference call

Flexbone's CEO has agreed to take one. Of everything on this list, ask for this.

The deck →

Fifteen slides, live at invest.hichit.com — it updates after it is sent.

Manufacturing drawings

1:1 factory drawings for both SKUs.

Certificate of incorporation

chit is a Delaware C-Corporation; the formation documents exist and can be sent.

The store, end to end →

buychit.com takes a configured order into a real Stripe Checkout session. Walk it with us on a call — it runs in sandbox until the live-payments switch is thrown.

The SAFE

The standard Y Combinator post-money SAFE at the $4M cap, drafted and ready to send.

Cap table

One page: two founders at 51/49, no pool, no prior instruments.

Contact

Ask us anything on this page.

Anything on this page, and anything not on it, we will answer directly — including the two or three things a careful reader will notice we have stated narrowly on purpose. Thirty minutes, whenever suits; the calendar is live.