Why do people willingly put on their glasses every morning, while many hearing-aid users need constant encouragement to wear their devices?

That question helped inspire entrepreneur Matthew de Jonge to spend six years developing Fortell, an AI-powered hearing aid company that wants to rethink how people experience assisted hearing.

The startup has now raised $163 million from investors including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias. Its ambition is substantial: use artificial intelligence to challenge a hearing-aid industry where, according to the source, five companies manufacture 97% of products.

Fortell Wants AI to Decide What Matters

Traditional hearing aids generally work by amplifying sound to make it easier for the wearer to hear.

But amplification creates an obvious challenge: people don’t necessarily want every sound around them to become louder.

Someone having a conversation in a busy restaurant, for example, may want to hear the person sitting across the table without simultaneously amplifying every conversation and background noise in the room.

Fortell is approaching that problem differently.

Its technology is designed to understand the surrounding sound environment in real time, identify what’s important to the wearer, and reduce competing noise.

Rather than simply making the world louder, the goal is to make it clearer and more selective.

That’s where AI becomes central to Fortell’s strategy.

Challenging a Highly Concentrated Market

Fortell isn’t entering an easy industry.

According to de Jonge, five companies account for approximately 97% of hearing-aid products, creating a market dominated by a small group of established manufacturers.

Breaking into a concentrated industry presents several challenges for a startup.

It isn’t enough to develop better AI. Fortell also needs to build reliable hardware, demonstrate that its technology works in everyday situations, establish distribution, earn consumer trust, and compete against companies with decades of experience.

Healthcare economics adds another complication.

The source notes that insurance does not generally cover the cost of hearing aids, meaning affordability can become an important factor in whether consumers adopt new products.

That creates an unusual combination of problems involving AI, hardware, healthcare, consumer behavior, and market concentration.

Why AI Could Change Hearing Technology

AI has already transformed speech recognition, audio processing, and voice technology. Applying those capabilities to hearing aids could potentially make the devices much more context-aware.

A future AI hearing aid could theoretically distinguish between multiple types of sound and determine which signals deserve attention.

That could mean prioritizing a conversation while reducing surrounding noise or adapting automatically as someone moves between environments.

The broader idea is that hearing aids could evolve from passive amplification devices into intelligent audio systems that continuously interpret the world around their users.

For Fortell, delivering that experience reliably could provide the differentiation needed to compete with established manufacturers.

$163 Million Gives Fortell Significant Backing

Fortell’s latest financing provides substantial resources for pursuing that goal.

Backing from Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Antonio Gracias also signals significant investor interest in the possibility that AI could disrupt an industry that has historically experienced slower technological change.

But large funding rounds don’t guarantee successful disruption.

Fortell will ultimately have to prove that its technology produces a sufficiently better experience for people who rely on hearing assistance every day.

AI Is Moving Into More Personal Technology

Fortell represents another direction for the current AI boom.

Much of the industry’s attention has focused on chatbots, coding agents, image generators, and workplace automation. Hearing technology demonstrates how AI could increasingly move into devices that interact continuously with the physical world.

And unlike another chatbot feature, improvements in hearing technology could directly affect how people communicate and experience their surroundings.

Fortell’s challenge is therefore bigger than building a smarter hearing aid.

If AI can make hearing assistance feel more natural, useful, and effortless, Fortell could help change not only the technology behind hearing aids — but how people feel about wearing them.