At SCB 10X, our mission is to identify and back frontier technologies that will fundamentally transform how people interact in both the physical and digital world. Today, we're excited to share why we co-led Hearvana's oversubscribed $6 million pre-seed round alongside Point72 Ventures, joined by AI2 Incubator, Amazon Alexa Fund, SBI Gateway Fund, Fortson VC, Ascend, Pack Ventures, J4 Ventures, and Moai Capital.

Hearvana represents a rare convergence of breakthrough research, exceptional founding team, and massive market opportunity in audio AI, underpinning our investment thesis and conviction in the company. 

The World's First Programmable Sound Bubble: The Next Evolution in Enhanced Hearing

Hearvana has created the world's first programmable "sound bubble" technology, a breakthrough in spatial distance filtering that we believe represents the next generation of enhanced hearing. The sound bubble offers a hearing experience that transcends today's noise cancellation and beamforming capabilities.

Published in Nature Electronics in November 2024, Hearvana's technology fundamentally reimagines how devices process audio environments. Unlike traditional noise cancellation that simply blocks external sounds or beamforming that focuses on directional audio, Hearvana's sound bubble enables users to define a spatial zone around themselves and selectively control what they hear based on distance and context. Prototype lab measurements demonstrate approximately 49 dB of outside-noise reduction with roughly 8 milliseconds of processing latency—all while maintaining approximately 6 hours of battery life on compact devices.

This isn't incremental improvement, it's a paradigm shift. Today's audio products force users into a binary choice: complete isolation through noise cancellation or full transparency mode. Hearvana's platform enables something entirely new—the ability to have a conversation with someone across the table in a crowded restaurant while filtering out surrounding noise, or to maintain awareness of safety-critical sounds while exercising outdoors, all programmable in real-time based on user intent.

We see this technology as a foundational infrastructure for the next decade of audio devices. Hearvana’s platform empowers devices to perceive the world beyond human capability, grasping intent and context in complex, noisy environments, and helping people communicate more effectively with each other and with machines. As AI assistants, hearing aids, smart glasses, and augmented reality devices proliferate, the ability to intelligently filter and manipulate audio environments will become as essential as visual displays are today. 

The company is developing towards end-to-end latency under 15 milliseconds in production devices, with a future goal of sub-5 millisecond performance, a critical threshold for natural human interaction and real-time applications. This level of performance, combined with on-device processing that preserves user privacy, positions Hearvana's sound bubble technology as the platform that will power the next generation of enhanced hearing across consumer electronics, assistive technologies, and enterprise communications.

A Formidable Team building at the Intersection of AI, Audio and Edge Devices

Great technology alone doesn't build great companies. Exceptional teams do. Hearvana's founding team operates at the rare intersection of edge computing, audio signal processing, and artificial intelligence, bringing together capabilities that are extraordinarily difficult to replicate.

Professor Shyam Gollakota, Hearvana's co-founder, is a world-renowned expert in mobile sensing and ubiquitous computing from the University of Washington. His track record speaks for itself: he previously founded Sound Life Sciences, which was acquired by Google, demonstrating both technical excellence and the ability to build technology that major platforms recognize as strategically valuable. Gollakota's decades of research in on-device AI and acoustic systems provide Hearvana with the scientific foundation necessary to tackle real-time spatial filtering with minimal latency and power consumption, one of the hardest problems in audio processing. 

Gollakota co-founded Hearvana alongside embedded systems and audio AI experts, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen. The combination of audio AI with systems-level vision and implementation expertise creates a highly technical team capable of translating breakthrough research into production-grade technology, positioning Hearvana as a hardware-agnostic solution and the acoustics layer for multiple consumer products – from hearing aids, earbuds and headsets to smart glasses and beyond.

What draws us to the Hearvana team is their multidisciplinary depth. Building Hearvana's platform requires simultaneous mastery in :

• Edge AI optimization: Running sophisticated neural models on power-constrained devices with single-digit millisecond latency
• Acoustic signal processing: Understanding the physics of sound propagation, microphone array design, and spatial audio rendering
• Machine learning systems: Designing models that can interpret intent and context in real-time, noisy environments
• Product commercialization: Partnering with OEMs and scaling technology from research prototypes to mass-market devices

This combination of skills is exceptionally rare. Most audio companies have hardware expertise but lack cutting-edge AI capabilities. Most AI companies have model expertise but lack the embedded systems knowledge to deploy powerful models in constrained edge devices. Hearvana's team bridges this gap, making their team and product proposition highly compelling. 

As the audio AI arena becomes increasingly competitive, we believe Hearvana's unique combination of breakthrough research, proven entrepreneurial track record, and multidisciplinary technical depth will make them a formidable force in shaping how billions of devices perceive and process sound.

Aligned with Our AI-First Vision

This investment aligns directly with SCBX Group's transformation into an AI-First organization. As we work to increase our AI-enabled revenue to 75% by 2028, partnerships with frontier technology companies like Hearvana provide critical insights into how AI can be deployed responsibly, efficiently, and at scale across edge devices.

Hearvana joins our portfolio of AI and deep tech investments including Together AI, AI21 Labs, Ema Unlimited, Jimini Health, Guardrails AI, Pokee AI, EBOTS and Blinkops, each representing our conviction that the next decade of AI innovation will be defined by companies that can bridge world-class research with real-world commercial impact.

We're excited to support Hearvana on their journey commercializing and scaling their technology into consumer devices, and we look forward to the innovations ahead as they build the future of human AI augmentation through audio.