A career spent chasing better sound, now with a technology that starts over
Kieran Harney runs a company most people have never heard of that builds a part they will never see. sensiBel, based in Oslo, makes microphones so small they disappear inside a phone or a pair of earbuds. Harney became its chief executive on September 3, 2025, taking over from Sverre Dale Moen after three years inside the company - first as chief operating officer, then as chief commercial officer. The board did not go looking outside. They handed the company to the person who had spent his career on exactly this problem.
The problem is old and stubborn. For roughly two decades, the tiny microphones in consumer devices have worked the same way: a thin membrane vibrates near a fixed electrical backplate, and the changing gap between them is read as sound. It is a clever design, and Harney knows it better than almost anyone, because he helped build the business that made it ubiquitous. But the approach has a ceiling. The electrical readout adds noise, and past a certain point you cannot make the microphone both smaller and quieter. sensiBel's answer is to throw out the backplate and read the membrane's motion with light instead.
The man behind the microphone in your phone
Harney's connection to this field runs deep. In 2005, as a product line director at Analog Devices, he founded the company's MEMS microphone business, built its profit-and-loss, and shaped its intellectual property strategy from scratch. That business became one of the quiet foundations of modern consumer audio. In 2013 it was acquired by InvenSense, where Harney continued to lead the microphone and audio product line. When TDK later absorbed InvenSense, he stayed on as managing director of audio products at TDK InvenSense. By his own accounting, he has spent nearly three decades in MEMS and more than twenty years specifically on microphones.
That history matters because sensiBel is not a story about a first-time founder with a lab prototype. It is a story about a veteran who has already taken a microphone technology from an idea to billions of units - and who chose, in 2022, to bet the next chapter of his career on a fundamentally different one. He joined sensiBel as COO that year, a step down in company size but, in his framing, a step toward the frontier of the field he has always worked in.
What sensiBel actually built
The flagship product is the SBM100B, which the company describes as the world's first studio-quality optical MEMS microphone. The numbers are the argument. An 80 dB signal-to-noise ratio, a 146 dB acoustic overload point, and a 132 dB dynamic range are figures more familiar from professional recording equipment than from a component that fits on a fingertip. sensiBel says the result rivals a studio microphone 50 to 100 times its size. In February 2026, the SBM100B won the EDN Electronic Products 2025 Product of the Year Award, an outside signal that the specifications are being taken seriously.
SBM100B, by the numbers
Harney has made the technical case in public himself. In an article for EE Times titled "Beyond the Backplate: Optical MEMS Microphones Unlock High-fidelity Audio," he laid out why removing the traditional capacitive backplate lifts the performance ceiling. It is a rare thing for a CEO to be able to write the engineering explainer for his own product, and it reflects how close he sits to the physics.
From evaluation kit to mass market
The hard part is not the demo. It is the volume. A microphone that wins awards in a lab has to be manufacturable by the millions at a price consumer electronics can bear, and that is precisely the terrain Harney has crossed before. Under his leadership, sensiBel released evaluation kits to get its parts into the hands of engineers, and in 2026 announced a foundry partnership with Silex Microsystems to secure high-volume production. The company's optical microphone has also been chosen to power the em64d Eigenmike, an ambisonics microphone used in professional spatial audio - an early proof point that the technology can hold its own in demanding applications.
sensiBel has raised in the neighborhood of $39.6 million in total funding, including a $7.7 million round in early 2024, and now employs roughly 38 people. Those are modest numbers against the giants of the semiconductor world, which is part of what makes the bet interesting. Harney's task is to turn a small Norwegian company's breakthrough into a standard, and to do it with a fraction of the resources that TDK or Analog Devices could bring to bear.
There is a symmetry to it. Harney helped define what a MEMS microphone was for a generation of devices. If sensiBel succeeds, he will have helped redefine it - not by refining the old approach, but by starting from a different physical principle entirely. He splits his working life between Boston, where he is based, and Oslo, where the company sits, running an international team across an ocean and a half-dozen time zones. For someone who has spent his whole career asking how good a tiny microphone can sound, it is the same question he started with, aimed at a new answer.