Based: Louisville
Year founded: 2023
Founder(s)/top executives: Matthew Neal, CEO/CIO; Jeff Cummins, CFO/business development
Capital raised to date: $145,000
Key investors: N/A
Number of employees: 3
Brief company description: Audiologists provide and fit hearing aids in quiet offices. It is difficult to convey how hearing aids will help a patient in difficult hearing situations, like a noisy restaurant, from a quiet audiology clinic. This leads to lower adoption rates and a poor experience for the patients. Immersive Hearing Technologies is developing an immersive hearing aid demonstration that brings real-life settings to the audiology clinic, allowing patients to listen to the features and benefits of hearing aids in the places they need them the most. The system helps audiologists provide more hearing aids, upgrade more patients to premium devices and improve patient outcomes with a more user-involved fitting workflow.
What is your company working on right now? Our team is hard at work expanding our technology to allow hearing aid demonstrations hosted on a variety of visual hardware including desktop personal computers, tablets, large-format touch screens (digital signage) and virtual reality headsets. We continue to create compelling content and streamline the overall workflow, so our product fits into clinical appointments. These improvements are vital to delivering an exceptional experience for both audiologists and their patients. Immersive is also raising a seed round of funding.
What’s on the horizon for your company in 2024? We expect to start a pilot program with a major hearing aid manufacturer in the first quarter of 2024. This pilot marks a significant step forward, allowing us to put our systems into real-world scenarios and gather valuable insights as we prepare for a product launch at the end of 2024. We also expect to execute at least one [Small Business Innovation Research] Phase I grant with either the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation. This will not only help continue the development of the product, but also provide scientific validation of our tool’s performance and accuracy.
