At 12, Michael Belhassen built a computer because he wanted to understand how its parts worked together. He also knew where he wanted those interests to take him: Apple. That is an unusually convenient answer to the childhood question about what happens when you grow up. The awkward question arrives later, after the ambition has become an actual job. What do you do once you have got there?
Belhassen’s answer was to leave. After five years designing iPhones, he founded Anoria, a San Francisco company developing a wearable intended to help people understand their emotional state. His public introduction moves quickly through the Apple years before arriving at a preoccupation he says lasted a decade: whether human emotion could be understood and measured. The two pursuits ran alongside each other. Eventually, the second became a company.
The turn is interesting because the first ambition had worked. He had studied engineering, entered the iPhone design organization and taken responsibility for hardware. He identifies his latest Apple assignment as leading design of the iPhone 17 Pro enclosure. There was a finished answer to the question he had asked as a boy. He chose to ask another.
The computer before the company
His early fascination with Apple had a particular character. Steve Jobs interested him for the way he brought technology and design together. Belhassen watched the interviews and product presentations, studying a way of thinking as well as the devices themselves. The attraction was to an object that could be technically intricate and still make immediate sense in someone’s hand.
Building the computer gave that fascination something physical to work on. In his recollection, the point was to discover what each component did and how the collection became a working system. Anyone who has assembled a computer will recognize the interval between arranging the parts and finding out whether the thing turns on. A beautifully reasoned arrangement can still require another look at a cable.
That interest in integration would become his profession. He studied mechanical engineering at Imperial College London from 2017 to 2021, earning a master’s degree. The degree supplied a formal route into the kinds of problems that had attracted him much earlier. The eventual career would involve fitting ideas into physical constraints, where enthusiasm has to negotiate with materials, dimensions and other people’s components.
A helmet, an internship, a way in
Before the Apple career came an experiment with a helmet. At 17, Belhassen worked with RideOn, an augmented reality startup whose initial application was skiing. Former colleague and co-founder Tomer Cohen recalled that Belhassen ordered a helmet from AliExpress and tried mounting the company’s display for motorcycle use. It was a practical proposal for another setting in which the technology might belong.
The detail is more revealing than an adjective on a professional profile. He acquired an object and tested an idea against it. There was also an interest in the person using the system: Cohen recalled suggestions about limiting interaction while someone was moving on the slopes. The object, the interface and the surrounding activity were already part of the same design problem.
In 2018, during his first year at Imperial, Belhassen applied for an Apple internship. His career account credits Tang Tan, then a senior iPhone design leader and an Imperial alumnus, with giving him an opportunity. That summer supplied an entry into the organization he had watched from a distance. Later internships brought further work across Apple hardware before he moved into a full-time iPhone design role.
There is a satisfying lack of ceremony in the helmet episode. Startup origin stories tend to improve their lighting as they age. This one retains an online order and an experiment. Before a company can have a strategy, somebody has to discover whether the display will sit where they want to put it.
Mechanical engineering, MEng
iPhone Product Design team
Y Combinator Spring batch
The detail inside the object
At Apple, Belhassen’s work concerned the physical systems that make a device behave as a whole. His accounts discuss acoustics, component integration and enclosures. Those are intimate parts of an everyday object, even when the user never learns who worked on them. A microphone needs a place in the design. So does everything competing for that place.
He has described the pleasure of turning a concept into something people can use, and the responsibility of owning a component through that process. He has also discussed the conversations required to make different engineering disciplines agree. In that setting, a solution has to survive contact with colleagues whose constraints are as real as your own.
His materials interests extended into his studies. He described a university paper exploring shape-memory materials for customizable, 3D-printed glasses. The example links manufacturing to the experience of the person wearing the result. A material’s behavior becomes interesting because of what it might allow an object to do. That is a useful thread to carry into a company building something for the wrist.
“I enjoy the responsibility of owning critical components.”
Michael Belhassen
There is a human skill inside that technical work. A product designer must understand what other people are trying to achieve, make a case for a choice and accept that someone else may spot the flaw. The finished device rarely advertises the negotiations that produced it. They disappear into the ease of using the thing. For a founder, those negotiations spread beyond the engineering team to prospective colleagues, users and investors. The object still needs its dimensions settled. The company also needs people to agree on why it should exist, and what they are prepared to try together.
Founding changes the scale of that responsibility. The component belongs to a larger product; the founder has to choose what the larger product should be. Experience can help with the work of building. It cannot remove the need to decide which problem deserves the work.
Five people, a different scale
Anoria began with Belhassen as a solo founder. Its launch account described a five-person team, including former Apple and Meta engineers and people who had founded companies before. The company joined Y Combinator’s Spring 2026 batch. These are the proportions of the new undertaking: a small group, a new device and a founder accustomed to working inside a much larger organization.
The working setting also changed. Founding electronics engineer Akash Mahtani described a team living and working in a San Francisco house, iterating on physical prototypes. CMO Rebecca Laub described the early launch effort from an apartment in the city. Their accounts give the venture a domestic scale. Hardware still needs to work, even when the office is a place with a kitchen.
The proposed product has a compact outward form: a bracelet. Anoria describes its intended output through three terms - Energy, Mood and Focus - combined into what it calls a Flow Score. The purpose is to connect a person’s state with the activities around them and offer a useful next step. These are the company’s design intentions; the product remains an early undertaking.
Founders and creatives are the initial audience the team identifies. Belhassen has supplied a personal example of the intended use: he described noticing which prospective-investor conversations excited him. It is an appropriately awkward place to test a tool about feelings. A fundraising meeting already contains several interpretations of how well the conversation is going.
A DJ’s ear, an engineer’s problem
There is another part of Belhassen’s biography that sits outside the usual Apple introduction. He has worked as a DJ and music producer. His biography describes more than 25 performances across London, Paris and Ibiza. It also reports a karate black belt. The spare biographical sketch suddenly has a dance floor and a dojo in it.
It would be too neat to insist that these interests explain the company. They make him more legible as a person, which is useful enough. An engineer can have a life beyond the engineering, and a founder’s every pastime need not become a secret business qualification. Sometimes a record is a record. One hopes the audience is spared a product demonstration between tracks.
Music nevertheless appears in Anoria’s own examples of what someone might choose to do next. The everyday scale of that suggestion is telling. The promised use concerns a decision inside an ordinary day. For Belhassen, the ambition reaches beyond displaying a number to helping someone recognize a pattern and respond to it.
After the destination
Before founding Anoria, Belhassen had already described wanting technology to support human connection while asking less of people’s attention. That aspiration gives the career change some continuity. Apple had been the destination of his childhood interest. His later question concerned what kind of relationship people should have with the objects they carry.
A new wearable introduces its own demands. It needs to earn a place in someone’s day, and the person has to find the feedback useful. The engineering background explains why Belhassen would attempt to answer through hardware. The harder judgment will belong to the people wearing what he makes.
For now, the biographical arc has a pleasing complication. The boy who wanted to understand a computer’s parts became an engineer working on phones, then a founder asking questions about the person holding one. He reached his early destination. His next working life began when he decided where to go after that.