Nirva raises $33M for a pendant that only listens to you
Ambient AI is having a moment. Amazonlaunched a new wrist-worn devicewith Bee; a former Plaud execlaunched ambient appsthrough a startup called Ambi, which aims to also build its own hardware; and Applelaunched Voice Intelligence featuresduring its iPhone launch in September. Now, a company calledNirvais betting on a jewelry-like pendant and its ability to listen only to the wearer. The startup today announced a new $25 million pre-Series A round, adding to the $8 million it raised earlier in the year from investors like Lightspeed and South Park Commons, bringing its total raise to $33 million. Nirva was founded in 2025 by two former Meta Reality Labs employees, Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, along with Hanying Hu, who founded a fashion and jewelry brand. The company’s first device is a pendant, which can also be worn as a bracelet. The device weighs only around eight grams, making it easy to wear all day. Its battery lasts up to three days on a single charge. Longer term, Nirva aims to release more devices. In a call with TechCrunch, Nirva CEO Lyu said that the company wanted to build a wearable that blends in with fashion, but also provides value to users. “This is a piece of jewelry that only focuses on listening to your own speech. We are not like a voice recorder or like a meeting note taker. One key difference between us, Taya, Vocci, or Sandbar Ring is that we’re always passively listening to your own speech. So it’s always on. It keeps modeling the user and modeling your mind,” Lyu said. For ambient devices, privacy is a big question, as people might not like to be recorded all the time. Plus, devices like the Ray-Ban Meta have instilled fear in those who are around the person wearing the smart glasses that they are being recorded too. Nirva gets around this problem by asking users to record snippets of their voice during onboarding and building its model based on that. During use, the device filters out conversations or data captured from the other people around the device. That means it’s only recording the wearer. In addition, Nirva by default doesn’t keep any audio data or transcripts after processing the conversations. Nirva is positioning itself as a personal insights company rather than a productivity startup. However, its app shows you reminders or action items and ways to act on them. Lyu said that through its app, the startup wants to help users show up for others in a better way in their lives. “I think there’s no universal way to help everyone to solve their problems. We are building a tool to help people to improve their self-understanding, self-compassion, and self-awareness,” Lyu said. The companion app parses users’ speech and creates insights that it infers are related to the user’s personality, including patterns, the people who tend to be around them, the places they’ve been to, and other daily notes. Lyu emphasized that the app shows users insights around their emotions, communication style, and ways they can improve. Wyu gave an example of an incident when she forgot to thank her mother for something, and the app later nudged her with a reminder about this. The company also said that, before it discards the audio, it’s able to track the tone, pitch, volume, and speed, which are useful for deriving emotion-related understandings that are then surfaced in the app. Nirva will start taking orders for its devices in November, with an aim to ship them to early users by the end of the year. The $249 device will be available in silver, brushed silver, black, and gold. The startup has competition in the AI wearables area. There are companies like former Apple employees’Taya, which is also building intelligent jewelry. Plus, startups like Friend and Bee are trying to be companion gadgets as well.
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