Nirva, a startup building a jewellery-like AI pendant that listens only to the person wearing it, has raised a new $25 million pre-Series A round, taking its total funding to $33 million. The company announced the round on October 22, TechCrunch reported, adding to the $8 million it raised earlier in the year from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons.
Nirva was founded in 2025 by Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, both formerly of Meta’s Reality Labs, together with Hanying Hu, who founded a fashion and jewellery brand. Its first device is meant to be worn all day and to turn the wearer’s own speech — and only the wearer’s speech — into personal insights, a deliberately narrow answer to the privacy problem that follows every always-listening gadget.
A Pendant That Filters Out Everyone Else
The device is a pendant that can also be worn as a bracelet. It weighs around eight grams and its battery lasts up to three days on a single charge, according to the company. Unlike a voice recorder or a meeting note-taker, it is always passively listening, Lyu, the company’s chief executive, told TechCrunch: "We’re always passively listening to your own speech. So it’s always on. It keeps modeling the user and modeling your mind."
The filtering happens through a voice model built at setup. During onboarding, users record snippets of their own voice, and the device uses that model to isolate the wearer’s speech and filter out conversations and data captured from other people nearby. By default, Nirva does not keep any audio data or transcripts after the conversations are processed, the company said. Before discarding the audio, it tracks tone, pitch, volume and speed, which it uses to derive emotion-related readings that are surfaced in the companion app.
Personal Insights, Not Productivity
Nirva is positioning itself as a personal insights company rather than a productivity startup, although its app also shows reminders and action items. The app parses the wearer’s speech and builds insights about patterns in their life — the people who tend to be around them, the places they have been and other daily notes — with an emphasis on emotions, communication style and ways to improve. Lyu gave TechCrunch the example of forgetting to thank her mother for something, after which the app nudged her with a reminder about it.
"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 company plans to start taking orders in November and aims to ship to early users by the end of the year. The device will sell for $249 in silver, brushed silver, black and gold, and Nirva aims to release more devices over time.
Why It Matters
Nirva’s raise lands in a crowded ambient AI moment. Amazon has launched a new wrist-worn device with Bee, a former Plaud executive has launched ambient apps through a startup called Ambi, and Apple added Voice Intelligence features at its September iPhone launch — while Meta’s own agent hardware push, including the Muse Charm pocket device, shows the same idea coming from the platform giants. The open question for every one of these products is the bystander problem: people near the wearer never consented to be recorded, a fear sharpened by devices such as Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Nirva’s answer — a voice model that keeps only the wearer, plus deleting audio and transcripts by default — is a product-level attempt to design that objection away rather than argue it away. Whether the filter works reliably in noisy, real-world rooms is still unproven: the device has not shipped, there are no independent reviews of the voice isolation yet, and the funding now has to carry the company from announcement to a product strangers can test. The round is filed alongside other recent startup raises on this site, from Firstwork’s Series A for frontline hiring agents to the wider market for voice AI mapped in our ElevenLabs explainer, and it arrives as Meta’s agent reaches mass scale in Muse’s 10 million downloads.
Background
Always-on AI wearables have a short and bruising history: the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 both launched to heavy attention and failed to hold users, and companion pendants such as Friend are still trying to prove the category. The newer wave — Bee under Amazon, Taya’s intelligent jewellery from former Apple employees, Vocci and the Sandbar Ring, all named by Lyu as the competitive set — is betting that fashion-first design and a tighter privacy story can succeed where the first gadgets did not. Nirva’s founders pair Reality Labs wearable experience with a jewellery background, which is exactly the mix that pitch requires.
Source: TechCrunch, Fitt Insider
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