Nothing Tech, the British smartphone manufacturer that recently launched its innovative 3 and 3a pro models, has announced that it has raised $200 million in Series C funding, reaching a final valuation of $1.3 billion.
Nothing is now one of the very few independent European companies, if not the only one, producing smartphones that has achieved significant growth in recent years. The new funding provides Nothing with the foundation to accelerate product innovation and deepen its investment in native artificial intelligence products to continue its global expansion.
Carl Pei, CEO and co-founder of Nothing (pictured), released a statement saying: “Today we announced a new Series C funding round of $200 million and a total valuation of $1.3 billion. This milestone marks the beginning of our next phase: from being the only independent player in the smartphone industry to emerge in the last decade, we now aim to build a native AI platform where hardware and software can converge into a single integrated system.
From the outset, we had a clear conviction: if we could build a large-scale smartphone company and have a ‘last-mile’ distribution point in the consumer technology market, we would be in an optimal position for the next big technological change. At the time, we didn’t know what that would be, but today the opportunity is crystal clear. We have worked to build an end-to-end value chain capable of delivering products quickly, at scale and with high quality standards. As previous experience in the industry has shown, building a hardware company is extremely complex: there are many potential points of failure and very little room for error.
To meet this challenge, we created a team capable of balancing a pragmatic approach to rapid product launch with an innovative mindset, so that we could offer experiences that our community would appreciate right away. Today, we have a solid foundation: from award-winning design to a global manufacturing and supply chain network built to ensure quality and cost containment. In four years, we have shipped millions of devices; the beginning of 2025 marked the surpassing of $1 billion in total sales, with 150% growth in 2024.
Building this infrastructure has been the most complex and, at the same time, most valuable goal we have achieved so far. Thanks also to the support of our community, we now find ourselves in a position that would be difficult to replicate: the ability to launch any consumer hardware product from start to finish in just a few months, marketing operations capable of shipping and providing support worldwide, and a global community of users who co-create with us, all without the bureaucratic constraints and difficulties typical of established operators.
Over the past 18 years, the smartphone has become the primary personal computing device for managing the countless activities of daily life. In addition to its widespread use, what makes the smartphone the most powerful consumer device is its unparalleled access to information and user knowledge.
For this reason, we believe that smartphones will continue to be one of the most central devices even in the era of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, while AI has made revolutionary progress over the last three years, the smartphone user experience has remained largely unchanged. The innovations introduced have been largely disappointing, limited to minor improvements in photo editing, translation and basic assistance functions.
To enable artificial intelligence to reach its full potential, the consumer hardware industry must also evolve. This is where our vision comes in: to build a future in which operating systems will be profoundly different from those of today. Every system will know its user inside out and will be hyper-personalised; interfaces will adapt dynamically to individual needs; suggestions will emerge naturally and, once an intention has been confirmed, intelligent agents will act autonomously.
The system will take care of what is not essential, allowing each user to focus on what really matters, in a different way for each person. Unlike the current ‘one size fits all’ model, there will be billions of different operating systems for billions of different people.
Over time, this operating system will be present in all devices: initially on smartphones, audio products and smartwatches, then expanding to smart glasses, humanoid robots, electric vehicles and other future devices.
We believe that owning the ‘last-mile’ distribution point, with the associated contextual knowledge and user behaviour insights, is key to developing an operating system that can support people in their daily lives.
An AI-based system that does not know its users and is not always present cannot offer a truly hyper-personalised experience. This is our next chapter: integrating AI-based experiences into our hardware devices to reinvent the way technology can amplify human capabilities.
In the short term, we believe that smartphones will remain the only device sold in the billions each year. However, we are convinced that another type of device will soon emerge that is just as important. In the coming years, the more contexts provided to artificial intelligence, the more useful it will become.
However powerful smartphones may be, they cannot always be available: sometimes they remain in your pocket, other times they cannot be used because you are on the move or your hands are full. We are therefore confident that a new category of native artificial intelligence devices will emerge, capable of being available to users when needed and equipped with intelligence that can transform understanding into action. This is a time of great excitement, opening up the possibility of devices that can capture context in different ways and generate on-demand interfaces tailored to the user’s specific goals.
We have worked hard to imagine what this future might look like, and we look forward to launching our first AI-native devices over the course of the next year.
This new round of funding will enable us to further accelerate our innovation journey and expand our global distribution. The round was led by Tiger Global, with significant support from existing shareholders GV, Highland Europe, EQT, Latitude, I2BF and Tapestry, as well as new strategic support from Nikhil Kamath and Qualcomm Ventures.
At the same time, we are preparing to launch our next ‘community’ round, which will offer our supporters another opportunity to participate in our evolution. More details will be announced shortly.
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