Sacramento startup Noopl has introduced its first product, a directional hearing aid meant to cancel out irritating background noise.
The first product is a smartphone accessory that works with an iPhone and Apple AirPods Pro to select the sound from where a user’s head is pointed, and to cancel out all other directional noise.
“It’s easy and natural,” CEO Tim Trine told the Business Journal.
Noopl will launch this month for Apple, and an Android system should come out later this year, he said.
The company will be selling its device, which connects to the bottom of an iPhone, for $199. It interfaces with an app, which is free and doesn’t come with a subscription. That compares to hearing aids, which can cost thousands of dollars.
The company is selling the product direct-to-consumer as an audio device, so it is not considered a medical device.
“The mission of the company is to make this accessible to as many people as possible,” Trine said.
Noopl was co-founded in January 2020 by Steven Verdooner and Kevin Snow. Verndooner is the CEO of Sacramento medical technology company NeuroVision Imaging Inc., and Snow is a software engineer.
Noopl raised $5 million in a seed round from venture investors in January 2020, Trine said. Trine worked for 19 years with Starkey Hearing Technologies in Minnesota before moving to San Francisco in 2017 to be chief technology officer for Eargo, a direct-to-consumer medical device company.
Noopl is able to deliver its product at a relatively low price because it builds on capabilities of modern smartphones, Trine said. The latest smartphones have special audio and accelerometer capabilities. Noopl was able to repurpose those capabilities with signal processing and some hardware.
The company, which has seven employees, plans to spend the rest of this year selling products and learning who its customers are, Trine said. Noopl will be selling its units from its website, and it plans to sell on Amazon and Best Buy later this year.
Noopl may raise another round of growth capital at the end of this year.
“We are not looking at building this the Silicon Valley way, with round after round of VC investments,” Trine said. “I want to get to profitability as soon as possible.”
For the time being, the company “is laser focused on the hearing and noise problem,” he said. It could also add other related functions, like supporting automated speech recognition.
Trine said Noopl went from a concept to a product in less than a year, which is pretty amazing, especially considering that it was done remotely.
“It is strange to be launching a product during a pandemic,” he said, adding that one of the major uses of the device was thought to be isolating a single speaker in crowded restaurants. It can still help clean up sound in places like the home, grocery stores and medical offices.
“We’ll see how people use it,” Trine said.
