Hearvana

Hearvana (also referred to as Hearvana AI) is a Seattle-based company developing what it calls auditory or acoustic intelligence: real-time, on-device audio augmentation and comprehension software intended to let devices listen, interpret and manipulate sound. Its platform is aimed at AI assistants, hearing devices, earbuds, smart glasses and other voice-driven products, with the stated goal of letting devices prioritize, filter and act on relevant sounds in noisy environments and grasp intent and context beyond human hearing capability.

The technology is built on research from the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, including work on Target Speech Hearing, Sound Bubble, Full-Duplex Dialogue Agents and Proactive Conversational Assistants. Reported capabilities include locating sound sources, estimating their distance, and creating a user-controlled "sound bubble" that isolates chosen sounds or voices while suppressing others. Processing runs directly on the device rather than in the cloud, which the founders describe as low-power and low-latency enough for constrained wearables as well as laptops and smartphones.

As of the company's website, Hearvana was collecting waitlist signups and listing open jobs; earlier coverage described recruiting for founding deep learning engineer and founding acoustic simulation engineer roles."]

Founding story

Hearvana was founded by Shyam Gollakota, a professor at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and head of its Mobile Intelligence Lab, together with embedded systems and audio AI specialists Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen. Itani is a research assistant and PhD student at the Allen School who previously interned at Meta working on smart glasses. Gollakota had earlier co-founded Sound Life Sciences, a UW spinout with a smartphone app for breathing monitoring that was acquired by Google in 2022, and Wavely Diagnostics, which uses a smartphone app to detect ear infections. The company grew out of years of university research on superhuman and proactive audio AI systems, including a headphone prototype that used AI to create a "sound bubble" in noisy environments.

Business model

Hearvana develops audio AI algorithms and an on-device "acoustic layer" intended to be embedded in third-party consumer and hearing devices, and has said it plans commercial pilots with partners across consumer electronics and AI ecosystems.

Traction

Raised a $6 million oversubscribed pre-seed round announced in November 2025 with participation from Point72 Ventures, SCB 10X, the AI2 Incubator and the Amazon Alexa Fund, among others. The company is incubated at the AI2 Incubator, was hiring founding engineering roles as of mid-2025, and was accepting waitlist signups for its technology.

Latest developments

In November 2025 Hearvana announced its $6 million pre-seed financing and said the funds would go toward expanding engineering and go-to-market teams and initiating commercial pilots. The company also publishes a blog covering topics such as next-generation noise cancellation and semantic hearing for AI hearing aids.