AI hearing aids: Fortell’s $163M bet against a monopoly

Founder Matthew de Jonge spent six years building a hearing aid that filters noise instead of just amplifying it — and just raised $163M to prove it works.

Why Do We Accept Loud Hearing Aids But Not Blurry Glasses?

Here’s a question that stopped Matthew de Jonge in his tracks: why does he have to beg his grandparents to wear their hearing aids, when nobody has ever had to beg him to put on his glasses? Glasses just work. Hearing aids, for millions of people, don’t — not because the hardware is bad, but because they make the world painfully, uniformly loud. That gap became the six-year obsession behind Fortell, a startup now building AI hearing aids that just raised $163 million from investors including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias.

De Jonge unpacked the pitch on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, in a conversation with host Rebecca Bellan that’s worth hearing in full on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. What he describes isn’t just a better hearing aid. It’s an attempt to rewrite the rules of an industry that hasn’t had to compete on innovation in decades.

The Real Problem: Everything Is Just… Loud

Most hearing aids solve hearing loss the blunt way: they turn the volume up. All of it. The barista steaming milk, the chair scraping the floor, the conversation you’re actually trying to follow — all amplified together into an exhausting wall of sound. That’s the core complaint de Jonge builds Fortell around, and it explains why so many hearing aids end up in a drawer instead of an ear.

The stakes are bigger than any one product. Five companies control roughly 97% of the hearing aid market, insurance in most cases won’t touch the cost, and the category has moved at a glacial pace while every other piece of consumer electronics got smarter, smaller, and cheaper. That combination — concentrated supply, no price pressure from insurers, low innovation urgency — is exactly the kind of setup that tends to produce a founder’s favorite word: opportunity.

How Fortell’s AI Hearing Aids Separate Signal From Noise

Instead of amplifying everything, Fortell’s approach is to have the device figure out, in real time, what actually matters to the wearer — and turn the rest down. Think less “loudness dial” and more a system trying to model attention: is this a voice you’re facing? Is this the sound you’re trying to track in a crowded room? The AI hearing aids are meant to make that judgment continuously, adjusting as the environment changes instead of applying one static profile all day.

It’s a similar philosophy to what’s playing out across AI products generally right now: a system has to make a call about what’s relevant and what’s noise, live, with no do-over. That’s a genuinely hard problem, and it’s worth noting how often ambitious AI products look flawless in a controlled demo and then struggle the moment they meet messy, unscripted reality — a pattern explored in depth when AI voice agents leave the sales pitch and meet real customers. A hearing aid that has to keep working in a moving car, a windy street, and a crowded restaurant faces the same test, just with higher personal stakes.

Winning Over Founders Fund and Thrive Capital

Raising $163 million for a hardware-and-AI hybrid in a heavily regulated medical category is not a small feat. It took de Jonge six years to get Fortell to a pitch that landed backing from Founders Fund and Thrive Capital, alongside Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias — investors known for backing capital-intensive, physical-world bets rather than pure software plays.

Five companies build 97% of the world’s hearing aids. Disrupting that isn’t just a product problem — it’s a distribution and trust problem too.

That’s the harder sell in any pitch meeting: convincing investors that a company can out-build entrenched incumbents on the technology and out-navigate them on the regulatory, clinical, and insurance maze that surrounds anything worn in someone’s ear. The size of the round suggests investors are betting the AI layer is different enough to be worth the slower, more expensive road.

AI Wearables Are Coming for Hearing Health Too

Fortell isn’t building in isolation. Meta and Apple are both pushing audio-capable wearables — smart glasses, earbuds with health features — into adjacent territory, and newer entrants like Legato are circling the same space from different angles. The line between “hearing aid,” “hearable,” and “AI wearable” is blurring fast, and that’s a genuinely open question for the whole category: does a dedicated medical device win, or does hearing correction just become one more feature bundled into devices people already wear for other reasons?

It’s part of a broader pattern worth watching skeptically rather than just riding the hype: plenty of serious technologists have called for a more measured pace on how fast AI gets pushed into products that touch people’s daily lives. Health-adjacent hardware, where getting it wrong has real consequences for someone’s ability to hear their grandchild, is exactly the kind of category where that caution earns its keep.

Pricing, Insurance, and the Hearing Aid ‘Cartel’

The economics are where the industry’s structure really shows. Because so few companies dominate manufacturing, and because insurance coverage for hearing aids is patchy at best, prices have stayed high while quality improvements have stayed incremental. It’s the kind of setup critics describe, only half-jokingly, as a cartel — not because of any single bad actor, but because concentrated supply and weak buyer power tend to produce the same outcome anywhere they show up.

Fortell’s bet is that a genuinely better product — one that adapts to the wearer instead of asking the wearer to adapt to it — can justify a different pricing conversation entirely, and that scaling into new clinics with remote fitting can chip away at the distribution advantage the incumbents have relied on for decades.

What Founders Can Learn From Fortell’s Six-Year Bet

Fortell’s story is a useful reminder that the most defensible startup ideas often live in industries everyone else finds boring. A market with 97% concentration and stalled innovation isn’t a warning sign — it’s a signal that customers have been quietly settling for less than they deserve.

The AI hearing aids Fortell is building won’t be judged on a spec sheet. They’ll be judged the way every consumer hardware product eventually is: does someone actually keep wearing it? That’s a much higher bar than a strong demo or an impressive funding round, and it’s the same bar that determines whether any AI-driven product — a tool that keeps a company’s knowledge base current, an assistant that follows up on customer replies and learns from every interaction, or a device sitting in someone’s ear — earns a permanent place in someone’s daily life instead of a drawer.

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Sources

• How Fortell is using AI (and $163M) to crack a hearing aid monopoly | Equity Podcast — TechCrunch Equity podcast episode featuring Fortell founder Matthew de Jonge in conversation with host Rebecca Bellan.