“Why do I have to beg my grandparents to put on their hearing aids, but no one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses?”
That’s the question that drove Matthew de Jonge to spend six years building Fortell, an AI hearing aid startup that recently raised $163 million from the likes of Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias. The buzzy startup aims to build hearing aids that understand the sounds around you in real time, figure out what’s important and turn down the rest — instead of turning everything up at the same time, as most hearing aids do.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by de Jonge to break down what it takes to disrupt a decades-old industry where five companies make 97% of the products, insurance won’t cover the cost, and innovation has been slow to arrive.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
1:14 Why Matt built Fortell
5:16 The problem with hearing aids: everything’s just… loud
7:36 How Fortell’s AI separates important sound from noise
12:12 The funding pitch that won over Founders Fund and Thrive
16:31 Hearing aids vs. AI wearables (Meta, Apple, Legato)
20:34 Pricing, insurance, and the hearing aid “cartel”
23:25 Scaling up: new clinics and remote fitting
26:57 Outro
