Ambient AI is having a moment, and a startup called Nirva wants to sell it as jewelry. The company announced a $25 million pre-Series A round on Tuesday, adding to the $8 million it raised earlier this year from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons. Its total funding now stands at $33 million.
Nirva was founded in 2025 by two former Meta Reality Labs employees, Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, along with Hanying Hu, who founded a fashion and jewelry brand. Its first device is a pendant that can also be worn as a bracelet. It weighs about eight grams and runs for up to three days on a single charge.
The pitch is simple: a wearable that fits in with fashion and still gives the wearer something useful. Lyu said the device is built to listen only to its owner. “This is a piece of jewelry that only focuses on listening to your own speech,” she said in a call with TechCrunch. “We are not like a voice recorder or like a meeting note taker.” She drew a line between Nirva and competitors such as Taya, Vocci and Sandbar Ring, saying Nirva is “always passively listening to your own speech.”
How does the Nirva pendant avoid recording other people?
Privacy is the obvious hurdle for any device that is always on. People tend to be uneasy about being recorded, and smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta have made bystanders wary of being captured without their knowledge. Nirva’s approach starts at onboarding, when users record snippets of their voice so the device can build a model of them. During use, the pendant filters out conversations and other data from people nearby, so it captures only the wearer. The company also says it does not keep any audio data or transcripts by default after processing conversations.
What data does the Nirva app collect from users?
Nirva describes itself as a personal insights company rather than a productivity tool, though its companion app does surface reminders and action items. The app parses a user’s speech and generates insights it infers about personality, including recurring patterns, the people they spend time with, the places they go and daily notes. Lyu said the goal is to help users understand their emotions and communication style, and to show up better for the people in their lives.
She offered an example from her own experience. She once forgot to thank her mother for something, and the app later nudged her with a reminder. The company said that before it discards the audio, the device can track tone, pitch, volume and speed. Those signals feed the emotion-related insights shown in the app.
How much does the Nirva pendant cost and when does it ship?
Nirva will start taking orders for its $249 device in November and plans to ship to early users by the end of the year. The pendant comes in silver, brushed silver, black and gold. Longer term, the company aims to release more devices.
The category is getting crowded. Taya, which was started by former Apple employees, is also building intelligent jewelry. Friend and Bee are pitching their own companion gadgets. Nirva is betting that a device that stays quiet about everyone except its owner will set it apart.
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