Nirva raises $25 million for a $249 AI pendant that only listens to the person wearing it

Nirva, a 2025 startup making an always-on AI pendant, said on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026, that it has raised a $25 million pre-Series A round, bringing its total funding to $33 million, ahead of opening orders for its $249 device in November.

Every AI wearable so far has hit the same wall: people around you don't want to be recorded. Nirva's answer is to just not hear them, which is clever, and to throw away the audio, which is necessary. Whether “only listens to you” holds up in a crowded bar, and whether anyone wants a necklace that tells them they sounded tense on their 3 p.m. call, is the real test. Investors are betting that ambient AI wins if it looks like jewelry instead of a gadget. The $249 price is in impulse-buy range for exactly the people who already journal; everyone else will be waiting to see the first teardown of what “we don't keep the audio” actually means.

Nirva said it raised $25 million in a pre-Series A, a funding round that comes before a Series A, announced Oct. 22. The new money adds to $8 million raised earlier in 2026 from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons. TechCrunch puts the total at $33 million. The lead investor on the new round was not named. Those lines are TechCrunch's and Axios's.

The company was founded in 2025 by Wei Lyu, the chief executive, and Jason Chen, both formerly at Meta Reality Labs, Meta's virtual-reality and glasses division, and by Hanying Hu, who founded a fashion and jewelry brand. Those lines are TechCrunch's.

The device is a pendant that can also be worn as a bracelet. It weighs about eight grams. The battery lasts up to three days. It listens passively and continuously, and only to the person wearing it. During setup the wearer records short samples of their own voice, and the device uses those samples to filter out everyone else's speech. Those lines are TechCrunch's.

By default Nirva keeps no audio and no transcript after it has processed a moment. Before it discards the audio, it notes tone, pitch, volume, and speed, and uses those to infer emotion. The app turns that into what the company calls personal insights: patterns in the day, the people and places in it, emotions, communication style, plus reminders and action items. Wei Lyu said, “This is a piece of jewelry that only focuses on listening to your own speech. We are not like a voice recorder or like a meeting note taker.” That quotation is his.

The price is $249, in silver, brushed silver, black, and gold. Orders open in November. Nirva aims to ship to early users by the end of 2026. The company first showed the device at CES 2026. Orders are not open on the day of the announcement. Those lines are TechCrunch's.

TechCrunch names the other always-listening gadgets in this lane: Amazon's Bee wrist device, Taya, Sandbar, and Ambi, a startup from people who previously worked at Plaud. That list is TechCrunch's.

The picture is Nirva's, as TechCrunch credited it: a small brushed-metal tube, the pendant, on dark leather beside a pearl-style necklace chain.

In plain terms, Nirva said on Thursday that it has raised $25 million, $33 million in all, for a $249 pendant that is supposed to hear only the wearer and then throw the audio away. Orders open in November. No valuation was disclosed. The announcement does not say the pendant treats or diagnoses anything.