auryx, a Cambridge-based healthtech startup founded by an all-female team of scientists, has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding to turn the microphones already inside everyday earbuds into continuous health monitors.
The round is led by Celero Ventures, with participation from EWOR, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Vento, PurposeTech and a syndicate of angels.
The company did not start in a lab or a pitch competition. It started in a Cambridge pub, where two PhD researchers — Erika Bondareva and Kayla-Jade Butkow — decided they were done publishing and ready to build.
The problem they are solving is one most people experience without naming it. Consumer health wearables, including Apple Watch, Garmin, and Oura Ring, rely on optical sensors that use light to detect blood flow beneath the skin. That works reasonably well at rest. During movement, particularly at the wrist, signal quality degrades. The ear is anatomically more stable during everyday activities, and microphones are already built into hundreds of millions of earbuds.
Built on more than a decade of research at the University of Cambridge and founded in 2025, the company’s platform extracts health insights from sound, enabling devices already in use to capture a wider range of physiological signals than traditional optical wearables. By relying on microphones embedded in consumer hardware, auryx eliminates the need for new devices or changes in user behaviour.
auryx’s technology works by analysing acoustic signatures generated by the heart, lungs, and blood flow in real time. Unlike optical sensors that rely on light and can lose accuracy during movement, acoustic sensing captures a broader and more stable set of signals.
This allows the platform to go beyond basic tracking. In addition to heart rate, it can measure respiratory rate, cardiac output, and even blood pressure, metrics that are typically harder to obtain outside clinical settings.
The company is initially targeting the earbud market, where adoption is already widespread. Millions of people wear earbuds daily, making them an ideal entry point for continuous, passive health monitoring. By embedding its technology into devices people already use, auryx sidesteps one of the biggest challenges in digital health: getting users to adopt new hardware.
The funding will support further development of the technology, integration with hardware partners, and team expansion.
