AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way.

One of the companies chasing that bet is Sandbar, the startup behind the private voice ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a $23 million Series A led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Sandbar co-founder and CEO Mina Fahmi about why he thinks so many voice hardware devices before Stream struggled to break through, and why he’s betting that keeping the human firmly in control is what it’ll take to get wearable tech right.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro

1:24 From MIT neural interfaces to founding Sandbar

5:15 Live demo: capturing a note with Stream

9:19 Whisper mode and cross-device dictation

11:58 What makes hardware finally click for users

16:26 Learning from Humane, Rabbit, and Friend’s stumbles

19:09 The case against “always on”

21:20 Zuckerberg’s superintelligence letter, and where wearables fit

24:13 The funding: $36M raised to date

26:34 Why Sandbar chose the fully custom hardware path

28:36 Outro