intelligent hearing aids
weekly startup spotlight: fortell 🦻
there’s a subtle distinction to note when it comes to improving hearing technology. the general initial assumption is that sound is stifled, either partially or completely, and it must be amplified; however, the more pressing concern is filtering through that sound.
if everything suddenly got loud with no means to specifically focus on the friend right in front of me talking, i would probably become incredibly overwhelmed.
our brains constantly parse and prioritize sounds. the real bottleneck for many people with hearing loss is making sense of overlapping voices and ambient sound. fortell, a startup that launched publicly last month, targets this core challenge by designing a system meant to make speech louder, but also intelligible in complex environments.
fortell makes hearing aids that figure out what sounds matter, then boost those. the device uses multiple microphones and runs neural networks on a custom chip to separate speech from noise in real time, so voices come through clearly even in chaotic environments. under the hood, the models are trained on messy real-world audio scenes, using spatial and semantic cues that are compressed hard enough to run all day in a small, battery-powered computer behind the ear.
the startup has raised $150 million in funding and set its price point to $6,800. the company launched in new york and has positioned the brand as a luxury tool, with many initial customers being celebrities and influencers.
side note: i’ve also written about another startup working on ai-powered hearing aids, check chromatic out here.
questions i’d be interested to ask:
is fortell’s advantage fundamentally scalable, or does the current price and delivery model lock meaningful hearing improvement behind a luxury tier?
what independent, peer-reviewed evidence shows that fortell outperforms best-in-class hearing aids in real-world speech comprehension, outside of just controlled demos?
today’s drops 🔍️
the $40k amazon future engineer scholarship application closes in 2 weeks
design systems internship @ zoox
check out this ai for science and safety grant
btw, i also write a quarterly update focused on my work and project updates if you’d like to check that out here.
want to post an opportunity on my blog? shoot me a line at harsehajx@gmail.com.
teehee,
harsehaj