Nirva raises $33M for an AI pendant that only listens to its wearer

Nirva announced a $25 million pre-Series A round on October 22. Added to the $8 million it raised earlier in the year from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons, the company has now brought in $33 million, and the first thing it intends to sell is a pendant that can also be worn as a bracelet.

Founded in 2025, Nirva counts two former Meta Reality Labs employees, Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, among its founders, alongside Hanying Hu, who previously started a fashion and jewelry brand. That mix explains the design priorities: roughly eight grams of hardware, three days of battery on a charge, and a piece meant to read as jewelry before it reads as a microphone.

Nirva's answer to the privacy problem is to process only the wearer's speech. During onboarding, users read a snippet of their voice so the company can build a model of it; in daily use the device filters out what people around the wearer are saying. By default, no audio or transcript is kept once processing finishes.

Before discarding that audio, the device extracts tone, pitch, volume and speed, which Nirva argues is enough to support inferences about emotion and present them in the companion app. It is the reason the company frames itself as a personal-insights business rather than a productivity one.

Chief executive Lyu put the product logic plainly to TechCrunch: this is a piece of jewelry that focuses on listening only to your own speech, unlike a voice recorder or a meeting note taker. The difference from devices such as Taya, Vocci or the Sandbar Ring, he said, is that it listens passively and continuously, keeps modeling the user and modeling your mind. The app surfaces observations about personality patterns, the people and places around the wearer, and communication style, and occasionally nudges them about something they meant to do.

The category is filling up. Amazon has launched a wrist-worn device with Bee, a former Plaud executive started Ambi to build ambient apps and its own hardware, and Apple shipped Voice Intelligence features with its September iPhone launch, with Taya, Friend and Bee also in the field. Ambient AI is in a dense stretch of product experiments.

The commercial timeline is set: orders open in November, early users are targeted for delivery by the end of the year, and the device costs $249 in silver, brushed silver, black and gold. What to watch is how accurately the voice filtering works in noisy rooms, whether the no-retention promise can be verified by outsiders, and whether a one-time hardware sale or a subscription ends up carrying the business.