Sandbar, a startup by former Meta employees Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong, attracted much attention last year when it showed off its note-taking wearable, the Stream ring. The company has now raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures.
The company’s smart ring is focused on note-taking, similar to products by Plaud or Omi, and not health-tracking like Oura’s products. The ring has a microphone that’s off by default, but can be activated using a flat, touch-sensitive panel at the top. You can hold this touch panel to record notes, chat with an AI assistant on the accompanying phone app, and access media controls like play, pause, skip tracks, and control the volume.
Notably, the mic on the ring seems to be tuned for proximity, so you have to lift your hand to your face in order to take notes.
Fahmi, who previously worked at startups like CTRL-Labs and Magic Leap, said Sandbar has been working on the ring for over two years, before coming out of stealth last year following a testing phase with friends and early adopters.
“The response [to the launch] was a lot warmer than we expected, which is really encouraging and meaningful,” Fahmi told TechCrunch. “A lot of people said they could see themselves wearing this.”
Fahmi said the startup is seeing promising traction from its early users, with the first batch of pre-orders for the ring selling out last year, which spurred Sandbar to open up a second batch to meet demand. He said some users use the ring over 50 times a day for tasks like planning presentations, trips or meals.
The startup plans to start shipping the smart ring this summer. Sandbar said it is focusing on refining its app experience and what users can do with their recorded notes. The company is working on a web platform, improving its user interface, and reducing the latency of model responses. In the long term, the company wants to enable agentic workflows to enable users to take action using their notes.
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Fahmi pointed out that Sandbar is working on implementing conversational exchanges into its product, as many of its users ask the app’s AI assistant about notes they didn’t manage to complete recording.
“Something that we think is necessary is back and forth conversation. Unlike a lot of experiences where you just say one command and it’s either transcribed or acted upon, like, via a smart speaker, Stream is really good at iterative tasks which begin, maybe in conversation or editing a note, but hopefully expand to multi-turn conversations, where you’re Claude Coding in your terminal and you are clarifying things [via voice],” Fahmi said.
Sandbar’s phone app currently only works with the Stream ring, but the company said it is considering opening up access to people who don’t own the ring. The app can be used on its own to take notes in case the ring is charging or has been misplaced.
Sandbar currently has 15 employees, who have previously worked at companies like Amazon, Fitbit, Equinox, Google, and Apple. With the new fundraising, it plans to double its software and machine learning teams, and hire marketing staff.
The category of hardware devices for notetaking is growing. Companies like Plaud are producing devices that can take notes for meetings, and Pebble aims to ship a cheap $75 ring this year. Then we have startups like Taya, which are taking a premium approach by designing their products as jewelry to target a wider user base.
Adjacent’s Nico Wittenborn has experience in investing in voice-focused startups — he backed Blinkist, which can summarize entire books, when he was with Insight Venture Partners. He thinks that Sandbar’s Stream has a better form factor than other note-taking devices, and the action of lifting your hand to take a note signals the intent of a private use case, unlike other note-takers that might record conversations around you.
Wittenborn also thinks some of the hardware out there caters to only “tech bros,” and Sandbar’s form factor makes it suited for widespread adoption.
The startup previously raised $13 million from True Ventures last November. Sandbar has raised $36 million in funding to date.
