A new stealthy Seattle startup is taking sound technology to a whole new dimension.
Hearvana was just founded by University of Washington computer science researchers.
Shyam Gollakota, co-founder of Hearvana, told GeekWire that the company is “creating AI breakthroughs that are shaping the future of sound.”
“Our AI algorithms enable on-device superhuman hearing capabilities and will be part of billions of earbuds, hearing aids and smartphones,” he said. “It is an exciting time.”
Gollakota, a renowned tech inventor and researcher, said the company wants to help people seamlessly choose what they want to hear in real-time.
It’s taking on a big challenge with the help of AI — using technology to quickly process audio without requiring large amounts of power or compute on a device.
Hearvana is being incubated at the AI2 Incubator in Seattle.
“Hearvana is my favorite kind of startup as it addresses a familiar pain point — we all struggle to hear in noisy settings like a restaurant or a party — with deep AI technology,” said Oren Etzioni, technical director and partner at AI2 Incubator.
Etzioni, the former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, called Gollakota a “world-class computer scientist.”
Gollakota has a track record of turning research into startups.
He previously co-founded Sound Life Sciences, a UW spinout that developed an app to monitor breathing that was acquired by Google in 2022.
He’s also the co-founder of Wavely Diagnostics, which uses a smartphone app to detect ear infections.
Gollakota, a computer science professor who leads the UW’s Mobile Intelligence Lab, last year won a $100,000 award as one of six researchers honored as part of this year’s Infosys Prize.
His research focuses on wireless tech, battery-free devices, WiFi sensing and imaging, medical diagnostics via smartphones, and more.
Malek Itani, a research assistant and PhD student at the UW’s computer science school, is a co-founder of Hearvana. Itani was an intern at Meta, where he worked on smart glasses.
Gollakota and Itani published research last year on a headphone prototype that uses AI to create a “sound bubble” and can learn the distance for each sound source in a room.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to better reflect Hearvana’s product.
