Auryx has raised US$2m to develop earbud health monitors using everyday earbuds for continuous health tracking.
The Cambridge startup says its platform draws health insights from sound, allowing devices people already use to capture a broader range of physiological signals than traditional optical wearables.
The company started in a Cambridge pub, where PhD researchers Erika Bondareva and Kayla-Jade Butkow decided they wanted to stop publishing and start building. The all-female team of scientists founded Auryx in 2025.
Its platform builds on more than a decade of research carried out at the University of Cambridge. The technology analyses acoustic signatures, meaning sounds produced by the heart, lungs and blood flow, in real time.
Consumer health wearables such as the Apple Watch, Garmin and Oura Ring use optical sensors, which rely on light to detect blood flow beneath the skin. Auryx says these sensors can work well at rest, but signal quality drops during movement, especially at the wrist.
By contrast, the ear is more stable during everyday activity, while microphones are already built into hundreds of millions of earbuds.
According to the company, acoustic sensing can capture a broader and more stable set of signals. It says the platform can go beyond basic tracking and measure heart rate, breathing rate, cardiac output, which is the amount of blood the heart pumps each minute, and even blood pressure, all measures that are usually harder to track outside clinical settings.
Auryx is initially targeting the earbud market, where adoption is already widespread. By building its technology into devices people already use, the company says it avoids one of digital health’s biggest hurdles: persuading users to adopt new hardware.
The pre-seed round was led by Celero Ventures, with participation from EWOR, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Vento, PurposeTech and a syndicate of angel investors.
The funding will be used to further develop the technology, integrate it with hardware partners and expand the team.
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