Avi Schiffmann's AI companion Friend is back at $249 with a speaker and a $9.99/month memory fee. The device changed; the funding — a single 2024 seed round, most of it spent on a domain name — has not.

Avi Schiffmann's AI companion is back, and this time it talks. The 23-year-old founder relaunched Friend — the glowing, AirTag-shaped pendant worn on a neck cord — with a built-in speaker, a $249 price tag, and a $9.99-a-month fee to store its memories. Schiffmann demoed the new version, which he calls Willow, for the SF Standard's Zara Stone at his home in the Haight this week; TechCrunch reported the relaunch on July 30. The voice, Schiffmann said, runs on OpenAI's real-time models.

That's the product news. Here's the part the launch copy skips: the money behind Friend hasn't moved in two years. Schiffmann raised a single $2.5 million seed round that closed July 30, 2024, backed by an angel roster — Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas, Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, Morning Brew's Austin Rief, Caffeinated Capital's Raymond Tonsing. Then, per 404 Media, he spent $1,887,843 of it — roughly three-quarters of the raise — buying the friend.com domain in February 2024. No Series A has been disclosed. A search of SEC EDGAR returns no Form D for the company, which is unremarkable for a sub-$5 million seed but means there's no filing to check the numbers against.

So a founder who put most of his cash into a URL has now doubled his hardware price, from $129 to $249, and bolted on a recurring subscription — the classic move of a company that needs the unit economics to work without new outside money. Schiffmann told the Standard he sold out his original run; independent unit and revenue figures are undisclosed, and the $50 million valuation floated around the 2024 seed is contradicted by at least one startup database listing a far smaller number, so treat any valuation claim skeptically.

What to watch: whether Friend files a new round or a Form D as it scales v2, and whether the $9.99 memory fee is a feature or the tell that the $249 sticker doesn't cover the OpenAI inference bill. The device learned to talk. The cap table still isn't saying much.