Hearvana, a Seattle startup using AI to create “superhuman hearing capabilities,” raised $6 million in pre-seed funding.

The company was launched this spring by University of Washington computer science researchers, including co-founder Shyam Gollakota, a renowned tech inventor.

Gollakota previously told GeekWire that Hearvana is “creating AI breakthroughs that are shaping the future of sound” on-device, using the technology to quickly process audio without requiring large amounts of power or computing.

He predicted the tech would be part of billions of earbuds, hearing aids and smartphones.

In a new LinkedIn post on Wednesday, Gollakota shared more about Hearvana:

“Hearvana AI is a result of years of research and experience creating super-human and proactive audio AI systems. Our platform represents a major leap in real-time and on-device audio augmentation and comprehension, enabling AI assistants, hearing devices, smart glasses, and voice-driven products to listen, interpret, and manipulate audio with unprecedented quality and latency. Hearvana empowers devices to perceive the world beyond human capability, grasping intent and context in complex, noisy environments, and helping people communicate more effectively with each other and with machines.”

A professor at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Gollakota is head of the Mobile Intelligence Lab. He previously co-founded Sound Life Sciences, a UW spinout that developed an app to monitor breathing that was acquired by Google in 2022. And he’s the co-founder of Wavely Diagnostics, which uses a smartphone app to detect ear infections.

Malek Itani, a research assistant and PhD student at the Allen School, is a co-founder of Hearvana. Itani was an intern at Meta, where he worked on smart glasses.

The pair conducted previous research on a headphone prototype that used AI to create a “sound bubble” in noisy environments and could learn the distance for each sound source in a room. 

Hearvana is being incubated at the AI2 Incubator in Seattle.

The investment round was led by Point72 Ventures and SCB 10X with participation from the AI2 Incubator, SBI US Gateway Fund, Forston VC, Ascend, J4 Ventures, Pack Ventures, Moai Capital, and Amazon Alexa Fund.

Axios first reported on the funding.