Nirva, a startup building ambient AI jewelry, announced a $25 million pre-Series A round that adds to $8 million raised earlier, bringing its total funding to $33 million. Investors in the earlier round included Lightspeed and South Park Commons. The company was founded in 2025 by former Meta Reality Labs engineers Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, together with Hanying Hu, who founded a fashion and jewelry brand. Its first device is a pendant, also wearable as a bracelet, that weighs roughly eight grams and has a battery life of up to three days; Nirva says it plans more devices. The announcement comes as ambient AI products expand: Amazon launched a wrist-worn device with Bee, a former Plaud executive started Ambi, and Apple added Voice Intelligence features at its September iPhone launch.

CEO Wei Lyu describes the pendant as a piece of jewelry that focuses only on the wearer’s own speech, not a voice recorder or meeting note taker. The key difference from Taya, Vocci, and the Sandbar Ring, he says, is that Nirva is always passively listening to the user’s own speech and stays on continuously, modeling the user and their mind. For privacy, users record snippets of their voice during onboarding so Nirva can build a model from those samples; during use, the device filters out conversations and data captured from other people around it, recording only the wearer. By default, Nirva keeps no audio data or transcripts after processing.

Nirva positions itself as a personal insights company rather than a productivity startup. The companion app parses the user’s speech and surfaces inferences about personality, patterns, frequent contacts, places, and daily notes, along with reminders and action items. Lyu gave an example where the app nudged her to thank her mother after she forgot. Before discarding audio, the device tracks tone, pitch, volume, and speed to help derive emotion-related insights. Lyu says the broader goal is to help people improve self-understanding, self-compassion, and self-awareness.

The $249 pendant comes in silver, brushed silver, black, and gold. Nirva starts taking orders in November and aims to ship to early users by the end of the year. Competition includes Taya, an intelligent-jewelry startup founded by former Apple employees, and companion-gadget startups Friend and Bee.