Sandbar, a startup run by former Meta employees Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong, gained a lot of attention last year with its Streamling note-taking wearable. The company has now raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures.
The company’s smart ring focuses on note-taking, like products from Plaud and Omi, and not health tracking like Oura’s products. The ring is equipped with a microphone, which is turned off by default but can be activated using the flat touch-sensitive panel on the top. Press and hold this touch panel to record notes, chat with the AI assistant on the included phone app, and access media controls like play, pause, skip tracks, and adjust volume.
In particular, the microphone on the ring seems to be tuned for close range, requiring you to lift your hand to your face to take notes.
Fahmi, who previously worked at startups such as CTRL-Labs and Magic Leap, said Sandbar has been in the ring for more than two years, going through a testing phase with friends and early adopters before coming out of stealth last year.
“The reaction[to the launch]was much warmer than we expected, which is really encouraging and meaningful,” Fahmi told TechCrunch. “Many people said they could see themselves wearing this.”
Fahmi said the startup is seeing encouraging traction from early users, and that the first batch of Ring pre-orders sold out last year, prompting Sandbar to launch a second batch to meet demand. He said some users use the ring more than 50 times a day to plan things like presentations, trips and meals.
The company plans to start shipping smart rings this summer. Sandbar said it is focused on improving the app experience and what users can do with the notes they record. The company is working on the development of its web platform, improving the user interface and reducing model response latency. In the long term, the company wants to enable agent workflows to allow users to take actions using notes.
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Fahmi noted that Sandbar is working on implementing conversational interactions in the product, as many users will ask the app’s AI assistant questions about notes they were unable to complete recording.
“What we think we need is a back-and-forth conversation. Unlike a lot of experiences where you say one command and it’s transcribed or run through a smart speaker, Stream is very good at repetitive tasks that probably start with editing conversations and notes, but can hopefully be extended to multi-turn conversations where you can do Claude coding on the device and clarify things (in voice),” Fahmi said.
Sandbar’s phone app currently only works with Stream rings, but the company said it is considering opening up access to those who don’t own a ring. This app can be used alone to take notes in case your ring is charging or misplaced.
Sandbar currently has 15 employees who previously worked for companies such as Amazon, Fitbit, Equinox, Google, and Apple. With the new funding, the company plans to double its software and machine learning teams and hire marketing staff.
The category of hardware devices for note-taking is growing. Companies like Plaud make devices that can take notes in meetings, and Pebble aims to ship an inexpensive $75 ring this year. Then there are startups like Taya who are taking a premium approach by designing their products as jewelery to target a wider audience.
Adjacent’s Nico Wittenborn has experience investing in voice-focused startups, and while at Insight Venture Partners, he backed Blinkist, which can summarize entire books. He believes that Sandbar’s Stream has a better form factor than other note-taking devices, and that the hand-raised-to-take-note motion indicates intent for a private use case, unlike other note-taking devices that may record surrounding conversations.
Wittenborn also believes that some of the hardware out there is only aimed at “technical people,” and that Sandbar’s form factor lends itself to widespread adoption.
The startup previously raised $13 million from True Ventures in November last year. Sandbar has raised $36 million in funding to date.
