Bengaluru based startup NeoSapien has raised around 18 crore in a seed funding round.

Funding and Investors

Bengaluru-based NeoSapien announced a seed round of approximately ₹18 crore (about $2 million) led by Merak Ventures, with participation from a group of prominent angel investors including founders and senior executives from companies across consumer tech and startups.

The investors named by the company include Awais Ahmed, Anupam Mittal, Sameer Mehta, Namita Thapar and Aprameya Radhakrishna, whose involvement provides both capital and strategic networks for market entry and partnerships.

Company leaders said the funds will be used primarily to accelerate product development, expand market visibility and scale hiring across product, engineering and go-to-market teams.

The Product: Neo 1 and the PAIA Concept

NeoSapien’s flagship offering, Neo 1, is described by the startup as an AI-native wearable and a Personal AI Assistant (PAIA) — a device intended to act as a "second brain" by capturing, processing and organising everyday conversations and actions in real time.

The company presents Neo 1 as part of a new category of ambient intelligence devices that emphasise persistent memory and contextual reasoning, designed to proactively surface useful insights without requiring constant user engagement.

Neo 1 is positioned to work across more than 100 languages and aims to combine custom hardware with advanced contextual AI to reduce cognitive load on users and help manage information, tasks and follow-ups throughout the day.

The startup also plans to develop NeoCore, an SDK that would allow businesses and developers to build applications on top of NeoSapien’s intelligence layer, suggesting an ambition to become an operating system-like layer for future AI wearables.

What This Means for the Wearables Market

If NeoSapien’s vision is realised, the device and platform model could change how wearables are designed and used: shifting from single-purpose gadgets to always-on, context-aware assistants that retain and reason over a user’s past interactions.

Merak Ventures’ lead investment signals confidence from the venture community that ambient personal AI — devices that store contextual memory and offer proactive support — is an investable category with potential scale in India and beyond.

For consumers, the promise is convenience: fewer missed follow-ups, richer automated summaries of conversations and context-aware reminders without needing to open apps or type queries. For developers and enterprises, the NeoCore SDK could create a new ecosystem of services and integrations built on the startup’s intelligence layer.

Privacy, Data Handling and User Trust

NeoSapien presents its product as privacy-first, emphasising that user data will remain under user control and that the platform will offer ways to access conversational context without continuously recording raw audio streams.

Privacy practices and technical safeguards will be central to user adoption because always-on devices that retain personal context raise understandable concerns around data security, consent and potential misuse.

Experts in the broader market note that the trust question often determines adoption speed: clear policies, transparent data flows and user controls are typically required to convert early interest into mainstream uptake.

Founders’ Vision and Company Roadmap

NeoSapien was founded in 2024 by Dhananjay Yadav and Aryan Yadav, who frame the company’s mission as freeing human attention by building technology that "fades into the background" while preserving and surfacing relevant memory and context for users.

Their roadmap reportedly starts with Neo 1 as a consumer product and extends to an operating system layer for many kinds of AI wearables — from glasses and watches to pendants and rings — positioning NeoSapien to address both direct consumers and device-makers.

The seed funding is intended to accelerate this roadmap by strengthening product engineering, expanding its go-to-market capabilities and enabling partnerships through the NeoCore developer tools.

We're building technology that fades into the background so you can stay present in your life,

The founders have emphasised reducing cognitive load and allowing people to focus on higher-value activities by offloading routine memory and organisational tasks to an intelligent assistant.

Market Challenges and Competitive Landscape

NeoSapien enters a competitive field where large tech firms, startups and component makers are all exploring ambient AI, on-device intelligence and novel wearable form factors.

To succeed, NeoSapien will need to demonstrate strong hardware-software integration, reliable multilingual performance, robust privacy controls, and a developer ecosystem that encourages third-party services to integrate with NeoCore.

There are also practical challenges around battery life, always-on sensing, low-latency local processing versus cloud reliance, and regulatory scrutiny on personal data processing that the company will need to address as it scales.

Implications for Consumers and Industry

For consumers, early devices like Neo 1 could change daily workflows: automatic capture of meeting notes, intelligent reminders tied to past conversations, and contextual summaries to help with decision-making and follow-up tasks.

For the industry, a working PAIA platform could spur new product categories and services, while creating demand for standards around interoperability, privacy and developer access to contextual intelligence layers.

Investor and angel participation brings not only capital but access to distribution channels, marketing reach and domain expertise that can help NeoSapien accelerate product-market fit in India and potential international markets.

We believe NeoOS will power hundreds of millions of upcoming AI consumer wearables sold in India and across the world,

That ambition reflects investor optimism about the scale of opportunity if a reliable, privacy-conscious PAIA platform gains traction with both users and hardware partners.

Looking Ahead: What to Watch

Near term, watch for NeoSapien’s product launches, beta programmes and developer tools availability, which will indicate how ready the company is to scale beyond an initial set of users.

Adoption metrics, user feedback around privacy and utility, and partnerships with device manufacturers or enterprise customers will be key signals of product-market fit.

Longer term, the startup’s ability to maintain user trust while building a rich developer ecosystem will likely determine whether its vision of an OS-like intelligence layer becomes an industry standard or remains a niche offering.

In sum, NeoSapien’s ₹18 crore seed round gives the company runway to pursue a bold vision: building AI-native wearables that act as persistent, privacy-conscious assistants and an intelligence layer for future devices. The next milestones to watch are product rollouts, developer adoption and how the company addresses privacy and hardware challenges as it scales.