A startup named Legato came out of stealth this week with its first hardware, a pair of glasses carrying assisted-listening electronics in the temples, alongside a $12M funding round.

The startup was founded in late 2024 by Mehul Trivedi, who created Bose Frames and later led smart eyewear at EssilorLuxottica, and Steve Romine, who ran Bose’s hearing aids division. Their target is the mild-to-moderate hearing loss crowd, the largest slice of the hearing-impaired population.

Legato’s pitch starts with a familiar frustration: hearing aids tuned for quiet rooms turn useless in loud ones. Its AI-driven stack instead pulls speech out of background noise in real time, aiming to cut the concentration cost of following a conversation in a busy restaurant.

Despite the open-ear form, bystanders hear almost nothing: a dual-driver layout aims audio at the wearer and cancels what escapes, cutting 99% of the spill within a few inches. The founders say the frames come across as normal glasses, with no fiddly controls to manage.

Neotribe Ventures led the round, with Listen and Village Global joining, and most of the money has gone into product development. Legato expects to launch through select eye-care providers later this year, priced at “a fraction” of traditional hearing aids and potentially covered by vision insurance when bought at a clinic.

“Our goal is to make hearing as ubiquitous as vision,” Trivedi said.

Source: TechCrunch