Sandbar secures $23M Series A for AI note-taking ring

Sandbar, a startup founded by former Meta employees Mina Fahmy and Kirak Hong, attracted a lot of attention last year when it introduced its wearable Stream Ring for note-taking. 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, similar to the Plaud or Omi products, and not on health tracking like the Oura products. The ring has a microphone that is turned off by default, but can be activated using the flat, touch-sensitive panel on top. You can hold this touchpad to record notes, chat with the AI ​​assistant on the companion phone app, and access media controls like play, pause, skip tracks, and volume control.

Notably, the microphone on the ring seems to be set close, so you have to raise your hand to your face to take notes.

Fahmy, who previously worked at startups such as CTRL-Labs and Magic Leap, said Sandbar had been working on the loop for more than two years, before coming out of stealth last year after a testing phase with friends and early adopters.

“Reply [to the launch] “It was a lot warmer than we expected, which was really encouraging and helpful,” Fahmy told TechCrunch. “A lot of people said they could see themselves wearing this.”

Fahmy said the startup is seeing promising traction from its early adopters, with the first batch of pre-orders for the ring selling out last year, prompting Sandbar to open a second batch to meet demand. Some users use the ring more than 50 times a day for tasks such as planning presentations, trips or meals, he said.

The startup plans to start shipping the smart ring this summer. Sandbar said it is focused on improving the 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 typical responses. In the long term, the company wants to enable agentic workflows to enable users to take action with their feedback.

Fahmy noted that Sandbar is working on implementing conversational exchanges into its product, with many of its users asking the app’s AI assistant for notes that they were unable to complete recording.

“The thing that we think is essential is back-and-forth conversation. As opposed to a lot of experiences where you just say one thing and it gets transcribed or acted upon, say, via a smart speaker, Stream is really good at iterative tasks that start out, maybe in a conversation or editing a note, but hopefully expand into multi-turn conversations, where you’re Claude Coding in your terminal and you’re clarifying things.” [via voice]Fahmy said.

Sandbar’s mobile app currently only works with Stream, but the company said it is considering opening access to people who don’t have Stream. The app can be used on its own to take notes if the ring is charged or misplaced.

Sandbar currently has 15 employees who previously worked at companies such as Amazon, Fitbit, Equinox, Google, and Apple. With the new fundraising operation, it plans to double its software and machine learning teams, and hire marketing staff.

The category of devices for taking notes is growing. Companies like Plaud produce 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 take a distinct approach by designing their products as jewelry to target a broader user base.

Adjacent’s Nico Wittenborn has experience investing in audio-focused startups — he backed Blinkist, which can summarize entire books, when he was with Insight Venture Partners. He believes Sandbar’s Stream has a better form factor than other note-takers, and the act of raising your hand to take a note signals the intent of a special use case, unlike other note-takers that might record conversations around you.

Wittenborn also believes that some of the available devices only cater to “tech bros,” and the Sandbar’s form factor makes it suitable for widespread adoption.

The startup previously raised $13 million from True Ventures last November. Sandbar has raised $36 million in funding to date.