Always-listening AI gadgets have a basic problem: the people around you never agreed to be recorded. Startup Nirva thinks it has an answer, a pendant that listens only to the person wearing it. The company has raised a new $25 million round, bringing its total funding to $33 million, TechCrunch reports.
The device
Nirva’s first product is a small pendant that can also be worn as a bracelet. It weighs about eight grams and the battery lasts up to three days. Pre-orders open in November, with the first units shipping to early users by the end of the year. It will cost $249 in silver, brushed silver, black and gold.
The company was founded in 2025 by former Meta Reality Labs employees Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, together with Hanying Hu, the founder of a fashion and jewellery brand. The design is meant to look like jewellery first and a gadget second.
How “only you” listening works
During setup, you record samples of your voice. The pendant uses them to recognise you and filters out what other people say, so only your own speech is processed. Nirva says that by default it does not keep any audio recordings or transcripts after processing.
Before discarding the audio, it measures things like tone, pitch, volume and speed. Those signals feed an app that shows patterns in your emotions and communication style, the people you spend time with, the places you go, and reminders. CEO Lyu told TechCrunch the app once nudged her that she had forgotten to thank her mother for something.
“We are not like a voice recorder or like a meeting note taker,” Lyu said. “It’s always on. It keeps modeling the user and modeling your mind.”
A crowded field
TechCrunch notes that “ambient AI” gadgets are having a moment: Amazon has launched a wrist-worn device with Bee, Apple added Voice Intelligence features to the iPhone in September, and startups such as Taya and Friend are building AI jewellery and companion devices too.
Should you buy one?
Filtering out other people’s voices is a meaningful privacy step compared with devices that record everything, and not storing audio by default is the right choice. But a device that is “always on” and builds a model of your mind is still collecting very personal information about you. Before pre-ordering, it is worth waiting for independent reviews of how well the voice filter actually works and what Nirva does with the insights it creates.