A three-year-old hardware startup announced Friday that it has raised $42 million in Series B funding to scale production of a dedicated translation chip small enough to fit inside a pair of earbuds.
The chip performs speech translation entirely on-device across 40 languages, sidestepping the latency and privacy concerns that come with routing audio through cloud servers.
Investors in the round include two hardware-focused venture funds and a strategic stake from a major consumer electronics manufacturer that is reportedly evaluating the chip for a future product line.
The company's founders, both former researchers at a large chipmaker, say the real breakthrough was not the translation model itself but compressing it to run within the power budget of a hearing-aid-sized device.