Fortell's double-blind trial against a top hearing aid found 19 times higher odds of hearing words correctly in noise and a nine dB SNR gain.
Fortell chose to build its own brand and full-stack audiology business with clinics instead of licensing its technology.
It is starting with one Upper East Side clinic, adding a few cities in 2026, and titrating expansion against quality and trust.
Fortell bets AI sound separation can solve hearing in noise
The hearing aid market has been owned by five companies since the 1970s, and their devices still fail in noise. Fortell's bet is that a large AI, separating the sounds that matter and squeezed into a device with a few milliseconds of latency, can fix what amplification never could.
Takeaways
Hearing loss is as much brain as ear. Age-related hearing loss is sensorineural, as much a problem of the brain as of the ears. Amplifying sound is not enough. A hearing aid has to tell important sounds from unimportant ones.
A large AI runs inside the hearing aid. Fortell fitted a large AI into the signal path of a device that runs all day on a small battery and allows only a few milliseconds of latency. That took co-design, Jensen Huang's term, between AI chip designers and AI scientists.
Trial showed 19 times better word recognition. A double-blind randomised trial against the top-of-the-line hearing aid, run with NYU professors Bill Shapiro and Mario Svirsky, found odds of hearing words correctly in the hardest environment were 19 times higher, and SNR 50 improved by nine dB.
Fortell went vertical instead of licensing. It could have licensed the technology or sold the business, and there were opportunities. Instead it built its own brand, audiology business and clinics. Matt calls going vertical slow and hard but probably the bigger economic opportunity.
Five incumbents have held the market since the 1970s. The five big hearing aid companies carry about $50bn of market cap and have worked on this since the 1970s, while consumer electronics firms add amplification. Fortell's zone is the best device for people with hearing loss.
Fortell expands slowly to protect trust. Fortell sells from a single clinic on the Upper East Side, with another few cities in 2026, then one or two, then three or four. Matt would rather go too slow than blow trust, which is quickly lost and slowly earned.
How Fortell got to the hearing aid
In 2014, while at Bridgewater, Matt read audiology textbooks at night, then shelved the hearing aid idea because the signal processing of the day could not do the job.
He spent six years at Butterfly Network helping build a handheld imaging device that connects to an iPhone for about one hundredth the cost of conventional imaging. It became the best-selling medical imaging system of all time.
During COVID, background noise in video chats quietly disappeared. Matt realised the technology separated sounds by what they are rather than their frequencies, and that it could be a game changer for hearing aids.
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On this episode 3
Show 1
He and cofounder Cole spent months on a concept for a better hospital, then told investor Josh they were the wrong founders for it. Josh thanked them for their candour, and two weeks later they pitched him a hearing aid.