Ambient AI is experiencing a surge in momentum. Amazon recently introduced a wrist-worn device through Bee; a former Plaud executive launched ambient applications via a startup called Ambi, which also intends to develop its own hardware; and Apple unveiled Voice Intelligence features during its September iPhone launch. Now, a company called Nirva is placing its bets on a jewelry-like pendant and its capacity to listen exclusively to the wearer.

The startup announced a new $25 million pre-Series A round today, which adds to the $8 million it raised earlier in the year from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons, bringing its total funding to $33 million. Nirva was founded in 2025 by two former Meta Reality Labs employees, Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, together with Hanying Hu, who had founded a fashion and jewelry brand.

The company's first device is a pendant that can also be worn as a bracelet. It weighs only about eight grams, making it comfortable to wear throughout the day, and its battery lasts up to three days on a single charge. Longer term, Nirva plans to release additional devices.

"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. One key difference between us, Taya, Vocci, or Sandbar Ring is that we're always passively listening to your own speech. So it's always on. It keeps modeling the user and modeling your mind," Lyu said.

For ambient devices, privacy is a significant concern, as people may not want to be recorded continuously. Moreover, devices like the Ray-Ban Meta have instilled fear in those around the person wearing the smart glasses that they are being recorded as well. Nirva addresses this problem by asking users to record snippets of their voice during onboarding and building its model based on that. During use, the device filters out conversations or data captured from other people nearby. This means it only records the wearer. Additionally, Nirva by default doesn't retain any audio data or transcripts after processing the conversations.

Nirva is positioning itself as a personal insights company rather than a productivity startup. However, its app displays reminders or action items and ways to act on them. Lyu said that through its app, the startup wants to help users show up for others in a better way in their lives.

"I think there's no universal way to help everyone to solve their problems. We are building a tool to help people to improve their self-understanding, self-compassion, and self-awareness," Lyu said.

The companion app parses users' speech and generates insights that it infers are related to the user's personality, including patterns, the people who tend to be around them, the places they've been to, and other daily notes. Lyu emphasized that the app shows users insights around their emotions, communication style, and ways they can improve. Lyu gave an example of an incident when she forgot to thank her mother for something, and the app later nudged her with a reminder about this. The company also said that, before it discards the audio, it's able to track the tone, pitch, volume, and speed, which are useful for deriving emotion-related understandings that are then surfaced in the app.

Nirva will start taking orders for its devices in November, with an aim to ship them to early users by the end of the year. The $249 device will be available in silver, brushed silver, black, and gold. The startup has competition in the AI wearables area. There are companies like former Apple employees' Taya, which is also building intelligent jewelry. Plus, startups like Friend and Bee are trying to be companion gadgets as well.