AI note-taking hardware has proliferated in recent years, with credit card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcription earbuds all promising to capture meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a wave of wearable products, especially rings, are betting that people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas in the same way.
One company chasing that bet is Sandbar, a startup behind the private audio ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a $23 million Series A led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan speaks with Sandbar co-founder and CEO Mina Fahmi about why she thinks there were so many audio hardware devices before Stream struggled to catch on, and why she’s betting that getting wearable tech right will require keeping humans firmly in control.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about what’s next.
Why Fahmi designed Stream to be push-to-talk rather than always-on, and what he thinks “social acceptance” means for wearable AI. How Fahmi’s work at neural interface startup CTRL-labs, which Meta acquired in 2019, shaped the way he thinks about human input. Why Sandbar took the “extremely painful” route of building completely custom hardware instead of reskinning an off-the-shelf device. Fahmi believes this is what voice wearables need to break out of tech enthusiast circles and into the mainstream.
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