Funding profile · Hearing technology

AudioFocus

A Y Combinator Summer 2019 company with no Form D, no federal grant and no announced round. The only documented capital event is the batch itself.

0Form D filings on record for AudioFocus, Inc
0Federal grant dollars found in NIH and NSF award records
1Granted US patent, the only hard asset on the public record
2019Year founded, per the UC Berkeley licensing office listing

Data as of September 23, 2026. Company-reported figures are labeled.

Rounds at a glance

When Round Amount Investors Source
Summer 2019 Y Combinator batch Not disclosed Y Combinator Founder and YC listing
Aug 2019 Seed round indexed by a commercial database Not disclosed Not disclosed Unverified
2019 to 2026 Priced round or convertible note None filed None named No Form D
2019 to 2026 Federal grants $0 found NIH, NSF Public record

What the filings show

AudioFocus, Inc · no Form D on record · searched Sep 23, 2026

Company search
EDGAR returns no matching companies
Full text search
0 documents mentioning the name
Form D
None, so no offering amount, investor count or related persons are on file
Vehicles
No SPV or fund filing formed around the company
Caveat
An offering sold under Section 4(a)(2) rather than Regulation D files no Form D, so silence here is not proof that no money moved
Filing
SEC EDGAR, no CIK assigned

USPTO · US 11,937,073 · granted Mar 19, 2024

Application
18/386,165, filed Nov 1, 2023
Priority
Provisional 63/421,425, filed Nov 1, 2022
Assignee
AudioFocus, Inc, Oakland, CA
Inventor
Shariq Mobin, sole
Scope
Simulating rooms to curate synthetic acoustic training data and train a proximity based enhancement model
Pendency
139 days from filing to grant

Reading the filings

  1. The only documented capital event is the batch.Y Combinator invests in the companies it accepts into its batch program. Its blog puts the current standard deal at $500,000, set in January 2022, two and a half years after AudioFocus went through Summer 2019, and the terms in force for that batch are not stated in any source reviewed. The company has never announced a round, a lead or a valuation.
  2. No Form D is not the same as no money.A Regulation D offering requires a Form D within 15 days of the first sale, and none exists under this name. Placements made under Section 4(a)(2) leave no federal paper trail at all. What can be said is narrow: no filed offering, no filed investor count, no filed board.
  3. Non-dilutive money never arrived.No NIH or NSF award appears. For a company whose core cost is simulating rooms on cloud GPUs, an SBIR grant is the usual first outside money, and its absence means the engineering was paid for privately.
  4. The asset column is one line long.The provisional was filed Nov 1, 2022, the application exactly one year later, and the grant came 139 days after that. Fast prosecution of a single application, with no continuation on record, is the profile of a company protecting one idea rather than building a portfolio.
  5. The founder was asking in public.In July 2023 the chief executive posted a prototype update to Hacker News and asked readers for introductions to investors. That is a statement about the state of a raise, not a disclosure of one.
  6. No revenue can be inferred.No FDA establishment registration or device listing appears, so there is no evidence of distribution in the United States, and the only commercial artifact on the site is a waitlist offering 10 percent off a purchase.

Commercial signals

Signal Detail Source type
Regulatory No 510(k) is required for a Class I air conduction hearing aid, but registration and listing are, and neither is on file Public record
Product Waitlist offering 10 percent off, last archived Aug 2024; no price or retail listing found Internet Archive
Site activity Technology page content digest identical from Jul 18, 2024 to Mar 15, 2026 Internet Archive
Customers None named. The founder cited several excited patients in 2023 Founder
Competition Phonak shipped a dedicated real time separation chip in Aug 2024, and FDA authorized the first OTC hearing aid software the same year Public record

What to watch

  • A first Form D, due within 15 days of a first sale in any Regulation D round.
  • FDA establishment registration and device listing, the precondition for product revenue.
  • A continuation patent, or an assignment of US 11,937,073 to another party, which would read as a wind down.
  • Any acquisition or team move disclosed by an acquirer.

The AudioFocus story on Healthcare DiscoveryHealthcare Discovery

Related companies

  • Auricle: Also in Medical Devices. A two person medical device company building an implant that stimulates the hearing nerve from outside the cochlea, so patients can gain back high frequency hearing
  • Vena Medical: Also in Medical Devices. A sub-millimetre camera that looks forward from inside a brain artery, and a balloon catheter built to pull a clot out on the first try
  • Lumius: Also in Medical Devices. A Duke PhD spinout building a low cost 3D ultrasound attachment meant to turn a standard 2D probe into what its founders call “a 3D camera for the body,” starting with
  • Voyage Biomedical: Also in Medical Devices. A Berkeley startup that tried to cool the brain from inside a vein, published one preclinical study, and was bought by Penumbra

Sources

  1. Public recordEDGAR company search and full text search for AudioFocusSEC · Sep 23, 2026
  2. Public recordUS Patent 11,937,073, application 18/386,165USPTO · Mar 19, 2024
  3. Public recordDevice registration and listing query for AudioFocusopenFDA · Sep 23, 2026
  4. Public recordAudioFocus invention listing and founding yearUC Berkeley IPIRA · Sep 2026
  5. Public recordCapture index and content digests for audiofocus.ioInternet Archive · Sep 23, 2026
  6. IndependentSearch listing showing a seed round dated Aug 22, 2019, source page not accessibleCommercial startup database · Sep 23, 2026
  7. CompanyYC’s $500,000 Standard DealY Combinator · Jan 2022
  8. FounderPrototype update and request for investor introductionsHacker News · Jul 5, 2023

Compiled from SEC, USPTO, FDA and other public records and published reports as of September 23, 2026. Form D notices report offerings under Regulation D, and an absence of filings does not establish an absence of financing. Healthcare Venture Capital Fund holds no position in AudioFocus. This page is not an offer to sell or a recommendation to buy any security.