Nirva raises $33M for a pendant that only listens to you
TechCrunch Ivan Mehta
Nirva raised $33M for a pendant that listens only to the wearer. It’s betting privacy and jewelry can make always-on AI feel less creepy.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Ivan Mehta — read the original for the full story.
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Ambient AI is suddenly everywhere. Amazon has a wrist device with Bee, Apple pushed voice intelligence features at its iPhone event in September, and now Nirva is trying a different shape entirely: a pendant that looks like jewelry and only listens to the person wearing it.
The startup said it raised a new $25 million pre-Series A round, after pulling in $8 million earlier this year from backers including Lightspeed and South Park Commons. That brings total funding to $33 million. Nirva was founded in 2025 by two former Meta Reality Labs employees, Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, plus Hanying Hu, who had already built a fashion and jewelry brand.
Its first device can be worn as a pendant or bracelet. Nirva says it weighs about eight grams and can last up to three days on a charge. The company also says it plans to release more devices later on.
The pitch is not “meeting notes” or a generic recorder. Lyu says the device passively listens only to the wearer’s own speech, then uses an onboarding process where users record snippets of their voice so the model can be built around them. During use, it filters out other people nearby, and by default it does not keep audio or transcripts after processing.
Nirva is aiming at personal insight rather than office productivity. Its app turns speech into reminders, action items, and patterns it thinks relate to the user’s personality, emotions, communication style, the people around them, and the places they go. The company gave one example of the app nudging someone to thank her mother after she forgot to do it. It plans to start taking orders in November and hopes to ship to early users by the end of the year. The price is $249, and the device will come in silver, brushed silver, black, and gold.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right kind of AI wearable pitch: narrow, weird, and at least trying to answer the privacy problem instead of waving it away. The category is already full of gadgets that want to be your friend, your assistant, and your surveillance problem. Nirva is betting that a little restraint will sell better than another all-seeing collar.
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