Nirva raises $33M for a pendant that only listens to you

Nirva, founded in 2025 by former Meta Reality Labs employees Wei Lyu and Jason Chen along with Hanying Hu, announced a $25 million pre-Series A round on top of $8 million raised earlier this year from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons, bringing its total to $33 million. Its first device is an approximately eight-gram pendant, also wearable as a bracelet, with up to three days of battery life, that passively listens only to the wearer by filtering out other people's speech and by default keeps no audio or transcripts after processing. The $249 device, offered in silver, brushed silver, black, and gold, will begin taking orders in November with an aim to ship to early users by the end of the year.