13-05-2025
AI startup led by UW computer science whiz enables ‘superhuman hearing capabilities'
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Shyam Gollakota.
A new stealthy Seattle startup is taking sound technology to a whole new dimension.
Hearvana was just founded by University of Washington computer science researchers.
Shyam Gollakota, co-founder of Hearvana, told GeekWire that the company is 'creating AI breakthroughs that are shaping the future of sound.'
'Our AI algorithms enable on-device superhuman hearing capabilities and will be part of billions of earbuds, hearing aids and smartphones,' he said. 'It is an exciting time.'
Gollakota, a renowned tech inventor and researcher, said the company is developing unique AI models to help people seamlessly choose what they want to hear in real-time.
Part of the company's secret sauce is its ability to quickly process audio on a device without requiring large amounts of power or compute on a device.
Hearvana is being incubated at the AI2 Incubator in Seattle.
'Hearvana is my favorite kind of startup as it addresses a familiar pain point — we all struggle to hear in noisy settings like a restaurant or a party — with deep AI technology,' said Oren Etzioni, technical director and partner at AI2 Incubator.
Etzioni, the former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, called Gollakota a 'world-class computer scientist.'
Hearvana co-founder Malek Itani.
Gollakota has a track record of turning research into startups.
He previously co-founded Sound Life Sciences, a UW spinout that developed an app to monitor breathing that was acquired by Google in 2022.
He's also the co-founder of Wavely Diagnostics, which uses a smartphone app to detect ear infections.
Gollakota last year won a $100,000 award as one of six researchers honored as part of this year's Infosys Prize.
His research focuses on wireless tech, battery-free devices, WiFi sensing and imaging, medical diagnostics via smartphones, and more.
Malek Itani, a research assistant and PhD student at the UW's computer science school, is a co-founder of Hearvana. Itani was an intern at Meta, where he worked on smart glasses.
Gollakota and Itani published research last year on a headphone prototype that uses AI to create a 'sound bubble' and can learn the distance for each sound source in a room.
