Fifty million Americans have hearing loss. Only one in five does anything about it. Legato, a startup founded by two Bose veterans, thinks the solution isn’t a better hearing aid — it’s a pair of glasses you’d actually want to wear.
Legato emerged from stealth Wednesday with $12 million in funding from Neotribe Ventures, Listen, and Village Global. The company’s first product, Legato Frames, embeds hearing-assistance tech directly into eyeglass arms. Co-founders Mehul Trivedi and Steve Romine know this territory cold. Trivedi led the creation of Bose Frames and later worked on Meta Ray-Bans at EssilorLuxottica; Romine ran Bose’s hearing aids division and served as COO at Audicus.
What’s genuinely different here is the acoustic architecture. Traditional hearing aids use directional microphones, which work fine in a quiet room but fall apart in a noisy restaurant. Legato’s approach uses AI to separate background noise from speech, amplifying only voices. The frames also feature a dual-speaker system that directs sound toward the wearer while canceling leakage — the company claims a 99% reduction just a few inches from the ear. That solves a real problem with open-ear designs, which often broadcast audio to everyone nearby.
Legato is targeting mild to moderate hearing loss, the largest segment of the market, and says the frames will cost a fraction of traditional hearing aids. They’ll launch this fall through eye-care providers, potentially eligible for vision insurance — a neat distribution trick that sidesteps the audiologist channel entirely. Trivedi frames the pitch around connection rather than medical necessity: better hearing reduces dementia and depression risk, and a product people already wear for 16 hours a day could normalize hearing care the way glasses normalized vision correction. Whether consumers will actually buy hearing tech from an eyewear brand is the open question — but the team’s track record suggests they know exactly how to build it.
