Two executives who helped build Bose audio eyewear and its hearing aid business have raised $12 million to argue that the next hearing aid should not look like a hearing aid at all.

Legato, a Boston company founded in 2024, came out of stealth on Aug 26 with $12 million and a first look at Legato Frames, glasses that carry AI-driven hearing assistance in the temples. The company announcement names Neotribe Ventures as lead investor, with Listen and Village Global participating. No valuation was disclosed and no prior funding was reported. One discrepancy is worth flagging: the VentureTerminal feed logs the deal as a seed round with no lead listed, while neither the press coverage nor the company own release attaches a round label to the $12 million — and the release does name a lead.

What the company does

Legato was founded by Mehul Trivedi, now CEO, who led the creation of Bose Frames and later worked on smart eyewear at EssilorLuxottica and on the Meta Ray-Bans, and Steve Romine, who ran the Bose hearing aids division and served as COO at the direct-to-consumer hearing aid company Audicus. The product is an open-ear design aimed at people with mild to moderate hearing loss, using a dual-speaker system the company says cuts sound escape by 99 percent and an AI system that separates voices from background noise. Legato says the technology is covered by four granted patents and more than 20 pending applications.

The numbers behind the round

Three named investors, $12 million, no valuation and no disclosed earlier rounds. TechCrunch reports the money has largely gone toward product development and marketing — past tense, which fits a company that has been building quietly since late 2024 and expects to ship this fall. The figures Legato leans on are market ones rather than company ones: 50 million US adults with hearing loss, only about 20 percent of whom address it, inside a $15 billion global hearing device market. Absent from both the release and the coverage: unit volumes, preorder counts, headcount, or a price beyond the claim that Frames will cost a fraction of traditional hearing aids.

Why the timing matters

The distribution plan is the actual bet. Legato says Frames will sell online and through select eye care providers, and that units bought through a clinic can often be eligible for vision insurance. That routes a hearing product past the audiologist and into the optometrist chair — a channel with far more routine foot traffic and considerably less stigma attached to walking in. The 80 percent of people who never treat their hearing loss are not a technology problem so much as a behavior one, and eyewear is a category people already visit annually.

The risk sits in the same place. Glasses have become contested hardware, and the incumbents in that fight already own eyewear distribution outright. Legato founders know the terrain, having helped build products on both sides of it, but $12 million buys a launch, not a shelf war. What the fall release will test is whether the pitch survives contact with a retail counter that has never sold hearing before.

Source

TechCrunch — "Hearing tech startup Legato emerges from stealth with $12M and a peek at its AI hearing glasses"