earbuds
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The Bose Engineers Who Refused to Let Sleepbuds Die
Bose discontinued its beloved Sleepbuds in 2020. Three of the engineers who built them bought the idea back, raised roughly $28M, and rebuilt it as a sleep-data company hiding inside a pair of earbuds.
The Startup Betting Your Ears Know Your Heart Better Than Your Wrist
synseer's HealthBuds skip the wrist and the fingertip, reading your heartbeat through sound inside your ear canal. It is a bet that the next big health tracker is a thing you were already wearing to take calls.
xMEMS
xMEMS is a Santa Clara semiconductor company that builds sound and cooling out of silicon. Its piezoMEMS platform produces the world's first solid-state MEMS loudspeakers - all-silicon drivers with no moving voice coils - for earbuds, hearing aids, AI glasses and headphones, and the first 'fan-on-a-chip' active micro-cooling device that moves air inside phones, wearables and AI data-center optics. Founded in 2018, the company holds more than 300 patents and has raised roughly $129M across four rounds.