With advances in voice-to-text technology powered by AI models, transcription and note-taking has emerged as one of the primary use cases for wearable gadgets. Startups like Plaud and Pocket are also becoming more differentiated by specializing in products that can record and summarize meetings. Companies like Friend, Omi, and Amazon-owned Bee are exploring form factors like pendants and wristbands that offer ways to record people’s interactions and daily lives.
The latter aspect is a bit controversial, as people understandably don’t want someone to record them without their consent. A startup called Taya, founded by former Apple design engineer Elena Wagenmans, is trying to address these privacy concerns with a device that only records the user’s audio. As a bonus, this device is dressed up as a piece of jewelry. Designed to be worn as a nifty pendant.
The Taya necklace, which has a pre-order price of $89, comes with a button that you can tap to start and stop recording. By default, the microphone is turned off. The startup also ships with a companion iOS app where you can save notes and ask questions about them through an AI-based chat feature.
Unlike many of its older rivals, which are developing for a wide range of use cases, Taya is focused on ensuring the device only captures the user’s audio. During onboarding, the app will ask you to record an audio snippet. The app uses this to prioritize the user’s audio and minimize everything else while recording. The company said it is experimenting with using directional microphones to solve this.
Taya announced Wednesday that it has raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by MaC Venture Capital and Women Founders Fund, with participation from a16z Speedrun.
Wagenmans founded the startup in 2024 with Cinnamon Sipper and Amy Zhou, who previously worked at Apple. Mr. Schipper and Mr. Zhou have since left the company.
Wagenmans said he wanted to create a good-looking wearable that works just for the user, since people often don’t use these devices due to social image and privacy concerns. The company’s ethos is similar to rival companies like Sandbar and Pebble, which aim to create personal note-taking devices.
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“We realized there was a lot of utility that being single-player could offer. [gadget]. “Essentially, what we want to capture is your voice, not the room you’re in or other people,” she told TechCrunch.
Wagenmans said the company is experimenting with different mechanisms to make it easier for users to take notes and to get feedback from the pendant that a note has been saved.
The company currently has five full-time employees and several contractors working directly out of its San Francisco office.
Adrian Fenty, managing partner at MaC Venture Capital, said positioning Taya as a privacy-first device that doesn’t look like a gadget will help it expand beyond early adopters.
“While we’re excited about this category, we’re actually going to take Taya outside of the memo takers. These products are ambient recorders, capturing meetings and conversations around you. Taya’s purposeful single-player capture focuses just on you. We believe Taya can be the company that helps humans understand their behavior while helping humans evolve at work and personally, and having more fun in the process,” Fenty said.
This article has been updated to reflect that the $89 price is the pre-order price for the device.
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