By Hamza Faisal

The race to put an always-listening AI on your body just got a new contender. Nirva, a startup founded by former Meta Reality Labs engineers, has announced a $25 million pre-Series A round that brings its total funding to $33 million — money it will use to ship a jewelry-like AI pendant designed to listen to one person and one person only: you.

The round, announced October 22, follows an $8 million raise earlier this year from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons. Nirva was founded in 2025 by Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, both ex-Meta Reality Labs, alongside Hanying Hu, who previously founded a fashion and jewelry brand. The investors in the new round were not disclosed.

A pendant that only hears its owner

Nirva's first device is a pendant that can also be worn as a bracelet. It weighs about eight grams — light enough to forget you're wearing it — and its battery lasts up to three days on a single charge. The device opens for pre-orders in November at $249, in metallic finishes including silver, brushed silver, black, and gold, with shipments to early users expected by year-end.

Unlike a voice recorder or a meeting note-taker, the pendant is built to capture only the wearer's voice, continuously. During setup, users record voice samples that Nirva uses to build a personalized voice profile; the device then filters out conversations from people nearby. By default, Nirva says it does not retain audio or transcripts after processing them.

Before discarding the audio, the system analyzes tone, pitch, volume, and speed to infer emotional states, feeding a companion smartphone app that turns the patterns into relationship reminders and observations about daily interactions. The pitch is self-reflection, not productivity: the app wants to tell you how you sounded, not what you said.

Ambient AI's crowded jewelry box

Nirva is arriving in the middle of an ambient-AI land grab. Amazon recently launched a new wrist-worn device with Bee, a former Plaud executive launched ambient apps through a startup called Ambi that aims to build its own hardware, and Apple added Voice Intelligence features during its iPhone launch in September.

Chief executive Wei Lyu told TechCrunch the company wants to build a wearable that blends into fashion while providing real value. "This is a piece of jewelry that only focuses on listening to your own speech," he said. "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."

The privacy question hangs over it all

For ambient devices, privacy is the central question — and Nirva's answer is deletion by default. The company says it discards all raw audio and transcripts once the data is processed, addressing the fear, familiar from Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, that bystanders are being recorded without knowing it.

Still, one detail remains unclear: whether the speech processing happens on the device or in the cloud. Until Nirva spells that out, the most interesting promise of its $33 million bet — a wearable that listens only to you, and forgets everything it hears — rests partly on trust. Longer term, the startup plans to release more devices built on the same idea.

By Hamza Faisal