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After two years of building quietly, I’m excited to share what I’ve been working on: a new kind of hearing eyewear, made for conversation.
At @altina, we’re designing eyeglasses with AI-powered hearing enhancement to help people stay engaged, even in noisy environments.
We’re collaborating with the British eyewear brand Cubitts, one of London’s most respected eyewear makers.
Landmark moment in eyewear history today: Swedish eyewear brand CHIMI auctioned off the world's smallest glasses.
Bidding started at €20,000. They sold for €890,000.
The people have spoken. Less is more.
Glasses, with or without tech inside, need to work as a fashion product first. Only then do consumers give you permission to add technology.
The hearing aid industry is entering an AI chip arms race. But proprietary silicon may not be the moat everyone thinks it is.
Tal Bar-Or retweeted
Take a look inside Cubitts' new headquarters.
OT's Kimberley Young and Laurence Derbyshire visited the new site for a behind-the-scenes tour and spoke to Cubitts founder, Tom Broughton, about the vision behind the space.
Watch our full interview → ow.ly/V0Gz50ZtrAj
New York State’s ban on smart glasses in courthouses gets one thing right: people should not be unknowingly recorded in court.
But not all smart glasses are surveillance devices. Policymakers must distinguish recording glasses from camera-free, privacy-first smart eyewear like @Altina.
Really thoughtful piece. Wearables aren’t just about the tech inside them. They’re about identity, trust, and whether people feel comfortable around them.
I wrote about AI wearables — not just glasses — and how they make me sometimes feel like a spy. A thing I don’t always feel great about, even though I’m just doing my job by testing them.
tinyurl.com/afkdu7cn
Excellent article. One of the first press pieces to identify that smart glasses won’t become Swiss Army knives like smartphones, but fall into “a thousand niches.” It’s why we built @Altina around a modular temple architecture, with no electronics in the front.
Smartglasses are an inevitability, a new consumer-tech arms race for the last and best real estate on our bodies, writes Christopher @Mims. But what—and more important, who—are they for? on.wsj.com/4f8JhX5
Congrats to Cubitts on the opening of their beautiful new HQ today 👏
The British eyewear brand’s new HQ in King’s Cross is a 21st-century blend of office, factory and event space wallpaper.com/architecture/c…
This is the most-shared reaction I’ve seen to Meta’s Kylie Jenner collab. The privacy backlash to camera glasses is only going to grow.
I propose a new golden rule for smart glasses: If the CEO isn’t comfortable wearing the product during its reveal, then it isn’t ready for consumers yet.
Smart glasses won’t become everyday products just because the technology gets better.
They need to compete with regular glasses on their own terms: style, comfort, and fit.
That’s central to what we’re building at @Altina.
Thanks @uctodaynews for the conversation.
uctoday.com/immersive-workpl…
More momentum in the hearing space. Congrats!
Nagish is now Rylo.
We're thrilled to share our new name and announce that we raised $75 million in growth funding provided by @generalcatalyst Customer Value Fund, combined with $10 million from @Canaan, Contour Ventures, Vertex Ventures and others. This round brings our total funding to date to $101m
For decades, communication tech was built for hearing people and patched for everyone else. We set out to build the opposite: real-time AI-powered communication tools designed from the ground up for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, not bolted on as an afterthought.
Everything we've shipped so far was us getting warmed up. We're now kicking off the real swing—introducing new products, growing our team to better support our users, and reaching far more of the people the industry spent decades overlooking. Same fight we started with. A lot more firepower behind it.
We're just getting started.
Loved this discussion at the Fashionology Summit with @minafahmi, @lizwandersworld, @eleelenawa, and @vicmsong on how each of us approaches fashion in wearables. I’m biased, but this may have been the most stacked founders panel of this new wave of wearables.
Looking forward to speaking on the Wearables Worth Wearing panel at FASHIONOLOGY in New York this Saturday with @minafahmi, @lizwandersworld, and @eleelenawa, moderated by @vicmsong.
On the show floor, we’ll also be showing three @Altina pre-production devices publicly for the first time.
See you there.
fashionologynyc.com/
Tal Bar-Or retweeted
Nobody wants surveillance on their face.
Tal Bar-Or (@btal), Founder @Altina:
"The big tech approach to smart glasses: cameras, data collection, it makes people uncomfortable. With what we're doing, there's none of that."
After two years of building quietly, I’m excited to share what I’ve been working on: a new kind of hearing eyewear, made for conversation.
At @altina, we’re designing eyeglasses with AI-powered hearing enhancement to help people stay engaged, even in noisy environments.
We’re collaborating with the British eyewear brand Cubitts, one of London’s most respected eyewear makers.
Tal Bar-Or retweeted
"Fashion-first hearing eyewear." - @btal
Two AI chips. One on each side.
Une 10ms latency.
@Altina's glasses do what hearing aids don't: "They separate the speech from the noise. We just amplify the speech."
After two years of building quietly, I’m excited to share what I’ve been working on: a new kind of hearing eyewear, made for conversation.
At @altina, we’re designing eyeglasses with AI-powered hearing enhancement to help people stay engaged, even in noisy environments.
We’re collaborating with the British eyewear brand Cubitts, one of London’s most respected eyewear makers.
Thanks for having me on @ecommcowboy, @colindougherty & @chrislukehall!
This is exactly why we're building @Altina as fashion-first hearing eyewear.
80% of people with hearing loss don't wear hearing aids.
Even when you hand them a $7,000 pair.
"It's stigma. It's comfort. People still are not going to wear it."
@btal left Amazon's smart glasses team to fix that with @Altina.
The answer isn't a better hearing aid. It's deleting the hearing aid entirely.
Will be on @ecommcowboy this afternoon to share about @Altina! Tune in live at 2:45 pm ET / 11:45 am PT to hear me chat with @chrislukehall and @colindougherty about AI-powered hearing eyewear.
RUN OF SHOW // 5.27.26
@leacabrini - 12:40pm CT
@willnitze - 1:10pm CT
@btal - 1:45pm CT
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Appreciate @OptometryToday covering @Altina.
In collaboration with Cubitts, we’re building hearing eyewear like traditional eyewear. The goal is for Altina to fit naturally into the existing optical ecosystem.
aop.org.uk/ot/news/2026/05/1…
