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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/span><\/p>\n The chief executive of a start-up that forced OpenAI and former Apple design chief Sir Jony Ive to pull down marketing materials about their $6.4bn AI device venture has accused them of trying to \u201cbury\u201d his firm after discussing a potential investment. <\/p>\n iyO founder and former Google executive Jason Rugolo told the Financial Times he had been \u201cblindsided\u201d by the launch of io, OpenAI\u2019s partnership with Ive to create new AI hardware products, as both companies had previously been in deal talks with his similarly named start-up. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is a story of corporate aggression, of large companies trying to bury smaller companies,\u201d said Rugolo. \u201cIf we didn\u2019t win the restraining order, this announcement very well could have killed us.\u201d<\/p>\n The trademark dispute comes just a month after OpenAI revealed plans to acquire Ive\u2019s hardware start-up, in a bet on alternatives to the smartphone as the dominant device to access AI. <\/p>\n Over the weekend, OpenAI removed a blog post and short video about the deal, following a restraining order by a US federal judge on Friday. OpenAI and LoveFrom, Ive\u2019s design firm,\u00a0have denied any intentional trademark infringement or wrongdoing.<\/p>\n \u201cIt totally blindsided me: the announcement of a company doing a similar thing with the exact same name,\u201d Rugolo said. \u201cThey know what they are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n OpenAI said: \u201cThis is a baseless trademark dispute and not a case about stolen ideas or technology. iyO demoed a product in May 2025 that didn\u2019t function properly or meet our standards in hopes that we\u2019d acquire iyO. We passed. Jason Rugolo was also well aware of the io name and never raised concerns before our announcement.\u201d<\/p>\n iyO founder and former Google executive Jason Rugolo said he was blindsided by the launch of io, OpenAI\u2019s partnership with Sir Jony Ive<\/span> \u00a9 TED\/YouTube<\/span><\/p>\n iyO, spun out of Google\u2019s Moonshot lab in 2021, has designed AI earbuds named \u201ciyO ONE\u201d, offering what it calls the next wave of consumer hardware. The so-called \u2018audio computers\u2019 have conversational voice assistants plugged into a suite of apps. <\/p>\n In a lawsuit filed this month, iyO details how OpenAI\u2019s vice-president of product, Peter Welinder, met the start-up twice after Rugolo got in contact with Sam Altman in March. Welinder introduced them to one of Ive\u2019s engineers, a former top Apple design executive called Tang Yew Tan.<\/p>\n Tan requested that several team members try out the device, according to emails disclosed in the suit. Tan, Welinder, and Evans Hankey \u2014 the former Apple design chief who joined Ive at io \u2014 met with iyO again in May for a presentation of its product, according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n \u201cThe context of those meetings was an acquisition,\u201d said Rugolo. \u201cThey were talking about buying our company. They got everything, right down to how the software stack works. I foolishly trusted them, because I thought we were collaborating and serious about working together.\u201d<\/p>\n The meetings came three years after an initial round of contacts. In April 2022, iyO said it met Ryan Cohen, an executive at Altman\u2019s personal investment fund Apollo Projects, and LoveFrom team member and former Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. Both passed on investing at the time.<\/p>\n In a statement to the court, Altman said he was not aware of Rugolo or his company in 2023 when io was founded, adding that Rugolo emailed him \u201cout of the blue\u201d in March of this year seeking $10mn in funding. Altman said he passed Rugolo on to the io team \u201cas a courtesy\u201d and to \u201cevaluate any opportunities for collaboration.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In his court statement, Tan said he had agreed to meet Rugolo as a favour to a friend, that the demonstration of iyO ONE had failed, that he had refused offers to review the company\u2019s intellectual property, and that Rugolo \u201cseemed desperate for cash\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Tan claims in the court filings that Rugolo offered to sell the company for $200mn, with Rugolo \u201craising the issue of the io name in bad faith to try to force a deal with his company.\u201d<\/p>\n Rugolo told the Financial Times this statement was \u201c100 per cent false\u201d but could have arisen from a misunderstanding, since he was raising capital with a \u201cSAFE\u201d cap of $195mn \u2014 an upper limit on the company\u2019s valuation.<\/p>\n Recommended<\/p>\n Rugolo said his start-up had been trying to raise new funding this year as it looked to make a limited launch of 20,000 devices, but said the io announcement had hurt discussions. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard enough to raise money without any competition, and then when you\u2019re trying to get hardware funding, which is notoriously difficult [given the existing large industry players]- it\u2019s already really hard,\u201d said Rugolo.<\/p>\n The defendants \u2014 io products, OpenAI, Altman and Ive \u2014 argue that the suit is \u201cpremature\u201d, as io is \u201cat least a year away from offering any goods or services\u201d so there is \u201cno io product or marketplace context to evaluate\u201d. The defence added that io\u2019s first product \u201cis not an in-ear device like the one [the] Plaintiff is offering\u201d.<\/p>\n The trial in the case is scheduled for January 2028, with a preliminary injunction hearing set for October this year to determine whether the trademark infringement ban will continue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The chief executive of a start-up that forced OpenAI and former Apple design chief Sir Jony Ive to pull down marketing materials about their $6.4bn AI device venture has accused them of trying to \u201cbury\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9663,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[2124,2125,859,1434,1430,2126,2127],"class_list":{"0":"post-9662","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-accused","9":"tag-bury","10":"tag-ive","11":"tag-jony","12":"tag-openai","13":"tag-rival","14":"tag-startup"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}