Nirva just raised $33 million to build a pendant that listens to exactly one person: you. The startup announced a $25 million pre-Series A round on top of an $8 million earlier raise, bringing its total funding to $33 million as the ambient AI hardware race heats up.
Founded in 2025 by former Meta Reality Labs employees Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, plus fashion and jewelry brand founder Hanying Hu, Nirva is betting on a jewelry-like pendant designed to fade into your outfit while passively listening to your own speech all day.
Nirva pendant (Credits: TechCrunch)
What the Nirva Pendant Does
The device weighs only eight grams and can be worn as a pendant or a bracelet, with up to three days of battery per charge. Unlike meeting note-takers, Nirva positions itself as a personal insights company: the device is “always on,” continuously modeling the wearer and, in CEO Lyu’s words, “modeling your mind.”
The app surfaces reminders and action items, but the stated goal is bigger: “helping people improve their self-understanding, self-compassion, and self-awareness,” according to Lyu — and helping users “show up for others in a better way.”
Nirva’s Answer to the Privacy Problem
Ambient wearables live or die on trust, and Nirva’s pitch is that it never listens to anyone else. During onboarding, users record voice snippets that train the device to recognize only them — conversations from people around the wearer are filtered out. And by default, Nirva doesn’t keep any audio data or transcripts after processing.
That stands in sharp contrast to the backlash around devices like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which have stoked fears among bystanders that they’re being recorded too.
The timing is crowded — Amazon launched an ambient wrist device with Bee, a former Plaud exec launched ambient apps via Ambi, and Apple rolled out Voice Intelligence features — but Nirva is betting that fashion-first design plus strict bystander privacy is the winning combination.
Also Read: Solos AirGo V2 Smart Glasses Bring Powerful AI and Modular Privacy Design for $299 | Recursive Launches Flint, a Free Laptop Coding Model
Source: TechCrunch — read the full story there.