Hard Kr Exclusive | The open-type AI hearing aid has completed tens of millions of yuan in angel round financing, with millions of US dollars already raised through crowdfunding in overseas markets.

Text by ZHANG Ziyi

Edited by YUAN Silai

36Kr has learned that FlySound, an AI hearing aid company, has completed tens of millions of yuan in Angel+ round financing. This round is led by Huihe Asset, with Fangrui Capital acting as the exclusive financial advisor and participating in the investment. The raised funds will be mainly used for product R&D, algorithm iteration, medical device certification and market expansion. FlySound is incubated by Shenzhen Qingyuan Kechuang, an investment institution with Tsinghua University background, and plans to launch Series A equity financing in the near future.

Hearing loss is increasingly becoming a prominent health issue amid the global aging process. Data from the World Health Organization shows that more than 1.5 billion people worldwide currently have varying degrees of hearing loss, of whom about 430 million need rehabilitation services due to disabling hearing loss; by 2050, the number of people in need of hearing rehabilitation is expected to exceed 700 million. In China, public data shows that there are about 27.8 million people with hearing disabilities, and the demand for hearing health services continues to rise along with the aging of the population.

However, there are still high barriers from the detection of hearing loss to the actual acquisition of effective intervention. Traditional hearing aid services usually involve hearing tests, product selection, and professional fitting, while factors including price, shortage of hearing professionals, uneven distribution of service resources, as well as users' awareness and acceptance of hearing aids will affect the actual use of products. In recent years, OTC hearing aids, remote hearing services and digital fitting solutions have been gradually developed, and the industry has begun to try to cover the hearing loss population at lower service costs.

FlySound first launched the H8 product for people with mild to severe hearing loss, whose 5dB noise floor reaches the industry-leading level, while the noise floor of high-end products of top foreign brands is usually 15-25dB.

Next, FlySound developed "the world's first open-fit AI hearing aid -- B02" for people with mild to moderate hearing loss. Different from traditional in-ear hearing aids, B02 has a form and wearing experience closer to that of earclip-style earphones.

After its launch, the B02 product has raised millions of US dollars via crowdfunding in overseas markets, setting a global crowdfunding record in the hearing aid category; it has also made breakthroughs in commercialization, securing bulk orders with rapid growth.

The choice of open-fit design is based on in-depth user insights. Peng Shoukun, founder of FlySound, told 36Kr: In-ear hearing aids will cause problems such as "occlusion effect, stuffy feeling, ear pain (caused by long-time wearing), and moist ear canal", while hearing aids are worn for more than ten hours a day on average, which means users have to endure the discomfort for a long time; at the same time, at least 15-20% of the huge population with hearing loss cannot wear in-ear hearing aids due to conditions such as "otitis media, purulent ear discharge, ear canal deformity, and narrow ear canal". This means huge market opportunities.

However, the technical difficulties of open-fit hearing aids are also more prominent. Due to the lack of physical isolation between the speaker and the microphone, the amplified sound is more likely to be picked up by the microphone again, forming howling, and the technical difficulty of solving howling is much higher than that of in-ear hearing aids. Meanwhile, the gain of ordinary open-fit hearing aids is usually limited.

With its industry-leading AI acoustic algorithm for hearing aids, FlySound identifies the resonance features that may cause howling before sound output and suppresses them in advance, successfully overcoming the technical challenge of howling.

Peng Shoukun said that its products can currently achieve howling control under a maximum gain of 50dB. At the same time, the company has customized larger-sized dynamic drivers and ear tips for the products to balance sound gain, wearing stability and sound leakage control.

Another difference between hearing aids and ordinary Bluetooth earphones lies in the sound processing method. Bluetooth earphones mainly receive sound transmitted from mobile phones, while hearing aids need to collect external environmental sound in real time, distinguish human voice from noise within ten milliseconds, and process and compensate according to the user's hearing loss in each frequency band. This process is restricted by factors such as computing power, power consumption and latency.

Due to the high latency requirement of hearing aids, FlySound deploys the AI models related to acoustic processing on the device side, instead of calling cloud large models.

In addition to the open-fit form, FlySound also hopes to change the reliance of traditional hearing aids on offline fitting. Users can first complete a hearing test through the App, and the system will adjust the gain of different frequency bands according to the test results.

In terms of the market, FlySound has previously launched products in overseas markets, and is advancing the medical device certification in the European Union and the United States.

The team members come from Huawei, Shokz, Anker, Goertek, Procter & Gamble, Foxconn and many well-known hearing aid enterprises, as well as top universities including Northwestern Polytechnical University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University, covering algorithm, hardware, product, marketing and manufacturing sectors. The algorithm consultant has more than ten years of experience in core algorithm R&D at the top five foreign hearing aid brands.

CEO Talk

36Kr: Why did you choose open-fit hearing aids instead of the more mature in-ear products?

Peng Shoukun: What we first noticed was the wearing problem. Many users do not have no demand for hearing aids, but cannot wear or cannot tolerate in-ear products for a long time, for example, those who have narrow ear canals or ear canal diseases. The open-fit design can significantly improve comfort, but its biggest difficulty is howling. Our idea is to use AI to first identify the sound features that may cause howling, and then conduct targeted processing, so that open-fit products can also provide the gain required for hearing aid and a comfortable experience.

36Kr: Do you expect to position the product as a consumer electronics product or a professional medical device in the future?

Peng Shoukun: We will not simply define our products as consumer electronics or medical devices. What users need is a simple, easy-to-use product that can help them hear clearly at a reasonable price. Traditional prescription hearing aids feature accurate fitting, but their adjustment relies on offline stores and the price is very high; ordinary OTC hearing aids are easy to purchase, but their performance and experience are not satisfactory. We are committed to providing cost-effective AI hearing aids with excellent experience through technological innovation and self-developed advanced algorithms.

Investor's Viewpoint:

Liu Anmin, General Manager of Huihe Asset: Hearing aids involve algorithm, hardware, medical compliance and channels at the same time, so the entry threshold for startups in this sector is relatively high. Huihe Asset invested in FlySound on the one hand because of the team's excellent product definition capability and proven commercialization experience, and on the other hand because it has built outstanding algorithm and hardware R&D capabilities for AI hearing aids.