Nirva, a startup founded in 2025, plans to sell a pendant for $249 that its chief executive says is built to listen only to the person wearing it. Orders are scheduled to open in November, with shipments to early users targeted for the end of 2026, so no one outside the company has yet lived with a finished unit. The company disclosed a $25 million funding round on Oct. 22 alongside the product details.
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Wei Lyu, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, summed up the idea as a piece of jewelry that focuses only on listening to the wearer’s own speech. The other co-founders are Jason Chen, the chief technology officer, and Hanying Hu, who founded a jewelry brand; Lyu and Chen both previously worked at Meta Reality Labs. Everything about how the device performs, as opposed to how it is built and priced, is so far the company’s description.
The $249 price, the hardware and the ship date
TechCrunch reported the $249 price for a pendant that can also be worn as a bracelet, weighs about 8 grams and runs up to three days on a charge. It comes in silver, brushed silver, black and gold. The price is the United States figure as reported, and the article describes a product that has not shipped. Nirva says longer term it plans more devices.
The product has a public history. At CES in January 2026, Tom’s Guide reported a hands-on demonstration of an earlier configuration: a device of roughly 10 grams with about two days of battery, a $200 module with $30 to $50 more for a necklace or bracelet, and a monthly app fee of $12 to $14, with shipping expected in the first half of 2026. Techlicious, in a piece dated the same day, described a titanium body weighing 0.35 ounces and likewise pointed to first-half delivery. The October reporting gives a lower weight, a longer battery life, a single $249 price and a year-end shipping target, and it does not say whether the monthly app fee still applies.
Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early backer, wrote on July 9 that driving consistent engagement is the hardest part of creating a new category, and named engagement and hardware execution as the significant risks.
A voice profile built from onboarding recordings
According to TechCrunch’s report, users record voice snippets during onboarding so the device can model their voice. In everyday use, the device is meant to filter out speech from other people nearby. Before discarding audio, it reportedly tracks tone, pitch, volume and speed to infer emotion. Nirva says it keeps no audio or transcripts after processing by default. The companion app then generates insights about personality, communication style, recurring patterns, frequent contacts and places visited, along with reminders and action items; Lyu’s own example was an app prompt to thank her mother after she forgot.
Each of those descriptions is the company’s. TechCrunch notes that the device has not shipped, so the voice-filtering claim has not been independently verified, and the same holds for Nirva’s statement that it records only the wearer. A pendant on a chest in a crowded room has to separate its owner’s voice from a neighbor’s, and none of the coverage cited here includes a test of how well it manages that in noise, with similar voices or at low volume.
Privacy is the open question the whole category carries. TechCrunch notes that worry about being recorded by bystanders’ devices has followed products such as Ray-Ban Meta glasses. At CES, Tom’s Guide said the device has an indicator light that shows nearby people when it is sensing and recording, while Techlicious reported that Nirva Labs says collection can be paused with a sensor toggle, that data is encrypted, and that owners can delete their data at any time. Tone, pitch, volume and speed are extracted before audio is discarded, so the measurements are derived from recordings even where the recordings themselves are not kept.
Funding of $33 million across two rounds
Nirva’s funding totals $33 million: a $25 million pre-Series A round on top of an earlier $8 million raised in 2026. It is a cumulative figure rather than a single round. TechCrunch names Lightspeed and South Park Commons among the investors, and Lightspeed’s company page lists Nirva as a 2026 seed-stage investment. The pendant also enters a crowded field; TechCrunch lists Taya, Vocci and the Sandbar Ring as similar jewelry-style devices and Friend and Bee as companion gadgets.
Lyu said the aim is to help people improve self-understanding, self-compassion and self-awareness, and Nirva positions itself as a personal-insights company rather than a productivity tool. Whether a $249 pendant delivers that depends on things no report has tested: how reliably it hears only its wearer, how accurately it reads emotion from tone (the Tom’s Guide editor who saw the CES demonstration said the emotion metrics would need testing before they could be confirmed), and whether owners keep wearing it. Orders open in November, which is when people other than the company can begin to answer those questions.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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