auryx, a health monitoring startup, has raised £1.5 million in pre-seed funding led by Celero Ventures, with participation from EWOR, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Vento, PurposeTech, and a syndicate of other institutional and angel investors. It is building a platform that turns everyday devices, such as earbuds, into continuous health monitors using sound, analysing acoustic signals from the heart, lungs, and blood flow to capture physiological data in real time without requiring additional sensors or changes in user behaviour. The investment will be used to advance hardware integration and model development, deepen commercial partnerships, and accelerate team growth.
Most consumer health devices rely on optical sensors that use light to detect blood flow beneath the skin, which can be affected by motion, particularly at the wrist. The ear is described as relatively stable during everyday activity, enabling cleaner signal capture, while acoustic sensing allows a broader range of physiological signals to be extracted, including heart rate, respiratory rate, cardiac output, and blood pressure. The platform uses microphones already present in consumer hardware to enable continuous monitoring without additional hardware.
Founded by researchers from the University of Cambridge, it brings together work on extracting clinically relevant information from sound. Erika Bondareva focused on cardiovascular diagnostics from audio signals, while Kayla-Jade Butkow explored the use of in-ear microphones to measure vital signs. Cecilia Mascolo contributed over a decade of research at the intersection of machine learning and audio diagnostics and serves as Chief Scientific Officer.
auryx is initially focused on the earbud market, where devices are already worn by hundreds of millions of people, with plans to expand to other microphone-equipped devices and health applications. It is actively hiring across engineering and commercial roles to support development of a platform designed to scale across billions of devices.
We spent years in research proving that sound carries more health information than anyone had thought to listen for. auryx exists because we decided it was time to start doing something with this finding beyond the lab. Now we are putting it to work into devices people already wear, making continuous health monitoring something that just happens, without anyone having to think about it.
auryx caught our attention immediately: Cambridge research, proven science, and a software-only approach that turns the microphones already inside noise-cancelling earbuds into continuous health sensors. No new hardware. No behaviour change. Just a fundamentally smarter use of devices hundreds of millions of people already wear.
Erika stood out to us early through true out of distribution achievement in her career and deep sector insight. Over time, what became even more evident is her unique blend of raw horsepower and emotional intelligence. If anyone can bring this new category of technology to market and scale it, it’s Erika and her team.
auryx takes a novel approach to health sensing, using sound to capture physiological signals in a space that remains largely unexplored in consumer devices. This creates significant whitespace and is a real opportunity for the future of health monitoring.
