Skye from Signull Labs raised $3.58M before AI home screen launch for iPhone

Skye, an unreleased iPhone application from Signull Labs, has already raised $3.58 million and built a large waitlist. This is one of the first notable signals that users and investors are ready to bet on AI embedded directly in the everyday smartphone interface, rather than just in separate chatbots.

The project is based on the idea of a home screen that not only displays an icon grid, but itself adapts to the situation and suggests what's important right now. Instead of opening an app or calling a chatbot manually each time, the user sees personalized suggestions on widgets.

According to the team's vision, Skye can display weather information, account for current context, remind about tasks, help prepare for meetings, draft email replies, and even notice suspicious charges on bank accounts. Another direction is location-based recommendations: the app should suggest information about neighborhoods, establishments, and local points of interest near the user. To do this, the service uses data from connections that the user has personally authorized.

The development is being done by a small team from Signull Labs based in New York. The project creator has long spoken publicly under the pseudonym signull, but public documents link his name to Nirav Savjani. According to him, he previously worked at Google and Meta.

The product itself remains in closed testing and has not yet been released to the public, but this did not prevent it from quickly attracting attention. After the initial publications about the project, its video received about a million views, and tens of thousands of new users were added to the waitlist. Moreover, even before this wave, according to the founder, there were already more than 25,000 people in the queue.

Investors have also shown interest in the product. Signull Labs raised more than $3.58 million at the pre-seed stage, and the round itself closed back in September 2025. According to market data, the company's post-investment valuation was $19.5 million. Among the early supporters of the project were a16z, True Ventures, SV Angel, and a number of private investors; Signull Labs is also represented in the portfolio of Offline Ventures.

For a startup without a public release, this is a strong signal: the market is ready to fund not only new models, but new ways of interacting with them. In the case of Skye, the bet is not on a separate device nor on yet another AI messenger, but on an interface layer on top of the familiar iPhone. This is important in the broader context of mobile AI.

In recent years, users have become accustomed to AI living either in a separate app or as an assistant that needs to be specially invoked. But the next stage of competition seems to be about AI becoming a constant layer on top of the smartphone and starting to work proactively.

Skye is testing exactly this hypothesis: if the assistant knows the calendar, email, geolocation, tasks, and basic everyday patterns, it can not wait for a request, but suggest an action in advance. This experience is already closer to a personal operating layer than to the familiar chat window.

For the market, this means that competition in mobile AI is gradually shifting from the question of who has a more powerful model to the question of who better integrates intelligence into the everyday interface. Skye still faces many risks ahead: it needs to prove that such a screen doesn't irritate with unnecessary notifications, carefully handles private data, and actually saves time rather than creating a new point of information overload. But the very fact that the product already received capital and a massive waitlist without launch shows a simple thing: demand for an iPhone with more deeply embedded AI already exists, and startups are trying to occupy this niche before large platform players.