Caavo, the exciting machine vision-powered universal TV control system, is finally getting a very delayed ship date, after being first promised in June: the first 5,000 units will arrive February 14th, priced at $399. And the company has raised another $17.5M in venture capital for a total of $32.5M with an eye on delivering cheaper new products in the future.

Caavo was announced at Code Media in February in a demo with Walt Mossberg and Lauren Goode. It’s a powerful control system for virtually every streaming, cable, and satellite box out there. It’s not just a simple remote, though: you plug everything into the large Caavo unit, and it uses machine vision (what the company is now calling Caavo Vision) to intelligently navigate the interface for all of those boxes behind the scenes.

That’s very different than a standard universal remote like the popular Logitech Harmony series, which generally fire out a series of infrared macros without being able to verify that anything actually happened. Since Caavo is watching the interfaces displayed on-screen, it can do things no other remote can do, like create a single search index and watchlist across devices and services and intelligently navigate on your behalf. So you can be watching This is Us on your DVR and Godless from Netflix on your Roku, and Caavo will just find what you want in the background and play it for you when you search for it.

“We’re solving the universal remote problem, but we want to go beyond that to search,” says Caavo CTO Ashish Aggarwal.

I got a lengthy demo of Caavo in the Verge offices in New York last week, and it is seriously impressive; you can see it racing through interfaces on your behalf as you use it. To set it up, you first plug every device you own into the main Caavo unit, which is a large, flat box with eight HDMI inputs, a single HDMI output, and two USB ports for powering devices like the Chromecast. The Caavo itself plugs into your TV, and you’re done.

You can see the Caavo racing through interfaces on your behalf as you use it

Caavo is making neat custom HDMI cables with LEDs on each end so you can easily figure out what’s plugged into each input. You simply press the LED on one end and it blinks on the other. One of these cables comes in the box; you can buy more. There’s another neat cable trick as well: Caavo’s version of an IR blaster has been engineered to work over HDMI, so you only have to run one cable to devices that need IR control; a breakout box at the other end splits off the IR blaster. I don’t love IR blasters, but it’s clever.

Once it’s all plugged in, the Caavo takes 20–30 minutes to identify all of your devices and create an index of all your shows, and then it’s ready to go. In my demo, I watched it control a Roku, an Amazon Fire TV, an Apple TV, a Dish Network satellite DVR (with an absolutely atrocious old-school interface), and a PS4 seamlessly. Popular apps like Netflix and Hulu have home screen tiles, and when you click on them they’ll automatically launch on whatever device you’ve set as the default.

The main interface (which runs on a version of Android) is simple, and built around search and what Caavo calls “watchlists” — running lists of what you’re watching, where you’re watching it, and how far along you are. Aggarwal and CEO Andrew Einaudi say that watchlists are Caavo’s most important feature, since nothing else can offer a similar interface across devices and apps. (We’ll have to see how they work in reality when we review it, of course.) The remote supports voice search, so you can say something like “Search the Apple TV for Game of Thrones,” and then watch the Caavo switch to the Apple TV, open the search box, and type in your search for you. It’s kind of wild.

At launch, Caavo supports the following: Devices: The newest models of Dish, DirecTV, and Xfinity cable boxes

Roku

FireTV (all models)

Nvidia Shield TV

Apple TVs with Siri remotes Apps: Amazon

DirecTV Now

HBO Go

HBO Now

Hulu

iTunes

Netflix

Playstation Vue

Plex

Showtime

Showtime Anytime

SlingTV

Starz

TBS

TNT

Vudu

The remote is nice and large and the buttons are touch-sensitive, which lets the Caavo display what they’re going to do on-screen before you push them. If you need weird cable box buttons or something, they’re easy to get: the Caavo knows what device you’re using and can just pop up the appropriate buttons whenever you want. It’s a neat trick, and adds to the feeling that you have an intelligent assistant helping you use all your TV devices, not just a remote with a lot of buttons. It basically automates the work of watching TV.

The bad news: it supports 4K, but not HDR

The bad news is that Caavo supports 4K, but not HDR. “There’s no silicon that can do 8-port HDR,” says Aggarwal, noting that the company is pushing current HDMI switching technology beyond what it’s designed for. “The reason it’s a $400 beast — if you open the hood you’ll see what’s in there,” he says. Even still, the lack of HDR is going to make Caavo a tough sell for people investing in new 4K TVs and boxes — the same sort of people who might otherwise spend $400 on a universal control system for all that gear.

Aggarwal and Einaudi told me they know HDR support is going to be an issue, but insist there are enough people who just want to simplify their existing TV setups that it won’t be an immediate problem. And they don’t need that many people: the company expects to sell out of the first run of 5,000 based on launch notification email signups alone. After that, it’ll be producing another five to ten thousand at a time. So by the time Caavo is ready to go wide, it’s possible the silicon will have caught up. “People are starting to talk to us about [HDR support],” says Aggarwal, noting that there are only two silicon vendors who build chips capable of this kind of HDMI switching.

And there are other things to set up as well. “Customer support needs to be there and amazing,” says Einaudi. Caavo has about 80 employees, 60 of whom are in engineering, and Aggarwal and Einaudi are handling business development themselves. “It’s the hardest part,” says Einaudi. Caavo has met with most of the major device and service vendors after launching, and most are supportive. “The whole industry is in flux right now,” says Aggarwal. “Two years ago they would have shot us.”

Caavo Vision allows the system to do things you’d never expect

But even without HDR, the Caavo might be the most interesting TV control product in years. It connects to your devices and apps in every possible way: over the network where there are APIs, over Bluetooth, over IR, and over HDMI-CEC. Caavo uses all of these control methods simultaneously: it might send a power-on signal over IR, navigate the interface to launch an app using CEC, and then pass a deep link to that app using an API. Every box and app is different, and the Caavo team has mapped out strategies for each one. “I don’t think we’ve gone beyond any known protocols. We’re just putting it all together,” says Aggarwal.

There’s also Caavo Vision, which allows the system to do things you’d never expect: Caavo runs its own internal lightweight web browser that users never see so it can log into streaming services on the web and update its watchlists and playback statuses. It can store your cable password and activate apps for you. At night, it goes through your DVR and indexes all the shows you’re recording. You can use all your other remotes like the Apple TV remote whenever you want; the Caavo remote is always ready to go because the box always knows what’s on-screen.

There are, of course, Alexa and Google Assistant integrations that allow you to control Caavo with your voice, in effect giving you voice control for all of your TV boxes, even if they don't support voice themselves. (Caavo’s remote can’t pass your voice to your box, so if you want to use Siri on the Apple TV or Alexa on your Fire TV, you’ll still need the regular remote. “There are no interfaces to let us do that right now,” says Aggarwal.)

Caavo is already thinking about new products, including a soundbar

There’s no question Caavo is targeting a very small market here. People with enough boxes under their TV to need a $400 meta-box that controls them all. “You’re not going to spend $400 on a Caavo if you just have a Roku,” says Aggarwal. But the streaming market is fragmented, and companies like Amazon and Apple are developing exclusive content; Roku is rolling out its own channel soon. If you want to watch everything, it’s entirely possible you’ll need multiple boxes, and there hasn’t been an idea this big and interesting about controlling them all in years.

And while $400 for this first Caavo might seem like a lot, it’s just the company’s first step. Aggarwal, whose background is in audio devices at Harman International, is already thinking about additional products, including a cheaper box with fewer ports and a soundbar. “This is the first expression of what we can do, and it’s a high-end expression,” he says. “Our plans aren’t so big this year. The next goal is people with fewer than eight devices. But first we have to make sure it works.”