Meta Alum Mina Fahmi’s Sandbar Raises $23M to Redefine A.I. Wearable Tech

Mina Fahmi was working as a program manager at Meta when he became enthralled by the advent of large language models. But while he was exhilarated by A.I.’s rapid progress, something about his interactions with the technology didn’t feel quite right. Fahmi wanted to be able to talk through ideas effortlessly while walking around New York City and to engage with A.I. assistants that felt neither like companions nor co-workers. So, he decided to create a solution himself. That vision led to Sandbar, the startup behind the A.I.-integrated Stream ring.

The company’s sleek, voice-responsive rings—capable of answering questions or taking notes via an app—are set to ship this summer. The company today (March 1o) announced a $23 million Series A round led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures. While Sandbar isn’t disclosing its valuation, the funds will help expand its team and advance its mission to serve as a bridge between humans and machines.

“I really never wanted technology to replace people,” Fahmi, Sandbar’s CEO, told Observer. “I wanted it to be an extension of my own thinking.”

Fahmi co-founded Sandbar with Kirak Hong, the company’s chief technology officer. The pair share roots in human-computer interaction and interface design and launched Sandbar out of stealth last year. Fahmi previously interned at the neurotech company Kernel and augmented reality firm Magic Leap, while Hong worked at Google. The two met at CTRL-Labs, a neural interface startup that Meta acquired in 2019, where they worked together for nearly 4 years.

“A lot of what we learned working on interfaces at CTRL-Labs and at Meta is that when you decrease the friction to sharing what’s in your mind, you can do things you could never do before,” said Fahmi. That idea underpins the Stream ring’s design: it enables users to capture thoughts seamlessly even in noisy environments, where it can pick up whispers. People might use it to tick off grocery lists, jot down quick notes, or organize ideas into draft outlines.

The ring’s voice assistant is customizable to sound like its user and can be easily interrupted with a tap. “Framing something as ‘you’ brings the friction even lower, as if you were thinking with yourself,” said Fahmi.

Stream rings are available for preorder in silver ($249) or gold ($299), with shipments beginning this summer. There’s no mandatory subscription, but users get a free three-month trial of Stream Pro, which unlocks unlimited notes and chats and typically costs $10 per month.

With its fresh funding, the New York City-based startup—already backed by True Ventures, Upfront Ventures and Betaworks—plans to expand its 15-person team, adding software and machine learning experts. Looking ahead, Sandbar aims to evolve Stream from a memory aid into an agentic A.I. tool capable of taking action.

“We see a unique opportunity to have Stream be the way that you think, remember, distribute work amongst things that are working on your behalf,” said Fahmi.

Sandbar’s debut comes at a pivotal moment for tech wearables, as investors race to capitalize on increasingly personalized A.I. Historically, the segment has attracted less than 1 percent of total venture funding, according to Crunchbase. But that’s quickly changing. Last year, Finnish smart ring maker Oura raised $900 million at an $11 billion valuation, while Dubai-based Xpanceo brought in $250 million for its smart contact lenses, valuing it at $1.35 billion.

Major tech players are also moving in. Meta is advancing its smart glasses with EssilorLuxottica and, in 2025, acquired A.I. pendant maker Limitless. Amazon purchased Bee, known for its A.I.-enhanced bracelets, while OpenAI partnered with famed Apple designer Jony Ive on a secretive wearables project.

This surge of activity underscores, as Fahmi sees it, that even with A.I.’s incredible capabilities, the technology itself still needs better ways to integrate into human life. “There are these incredible new capabilities, but they don’t feel quite right,” he said. “Typically, when some new computing medium came about, a new way of using that medium was needed to take full advantage of it.”