USound: EIC Accelerator Bet on MEMS Speakers for Earbuds

Almost every earbud, hearing aid and smartphone still makes sound the way loudspeakers have for a century: a coil, a magnet and a moving membrane. USound, founded in Graz in 2014, builds the alternative out of silicon. Its speakers are micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS): a membrane driven by piezoelectric cantilevers on a chip, with no magnet and no coil, which can be soldered onto a circuit board by machine like any other semiconductor part.

In the 9 January 2019 cut-off, the European Commission selected USound for the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 EIC pilot programme that preceded the EIC Accelerator, whose pilot began with the October 2019 cut-off. The project, called Digital speakers, received an EU grant of €1,872,193.75 towards a total cost of €2,674,562.50 to develop "Kore", USound's second speaker generation, according to CORDIS. That speaker now exists under the name Conamara, and since August 2025 it has been on sale inside a pair of mass-market earbuds. Whether it has turned USound into a growing business cannot be read from the public record.

Where USound Stands Now

USound is active. The Austrian register lists it as registered, with two managing directors who have held the post since 2014 (a third co-founder, Jörg Schönbacher, left management in 2022, according to North Data), and shows its accounts for 2024 filed on 27 February 2026, along with corrected accounts for 2023 filed two days earlier, according to evi.gv.at. Capital increases were entered in January 2024, February 2025 and November 2025. In May 2026 the company announced a collaboration with WuQi Technologies, a supplier of low-power earbud chips, to run its heart-rate sensing software on WuQi's platform, and in June 2026 its distributor AATC showed its products at Computex in Taipei.

The company's own pitch has shifted. In 2019 it sold a better loudspeaker. Today its website leads with "sensor-free AI biosensing" and ultrasonic sensing: using the same MEMS speaker to send inaudible signals that measure heart rate, detect whether an earbud is worn, or measure distance. The speaker remains the product; the sensing software is a bid to make it worth more per unit.

The Technology: A Speaker Made Like a Chip

In USound's design, a membrane sits on cantilevers made of lead zirconate titanate (PZT), a piezoelectric material that expands or contracts when a voltage is applied, so the cantilevers move and the membrane vibrates, the company explained when it announced the EU grant in July 2019. Conventional micro speakers use either a moving coil in a magnetic field (electrodynamic) or a balanced armature. USound's argument, set out in its CORDIS report, is that a silicon speaker is thinner, uses less power, needs no rare-earth magnet and, because it can go through a reflow oven, fits into fully automated electronics assembly. The company claims its speakers take "50% less space" and use "80% less energy" than rival products; those are its own figures, not independent tests.

The weak point of piezo MEMS speakers is bass: a tiny membrane moves little air. In the earbuds and glasses named so far, USound's speaker plays the treble next to a conventional dynamic woofer. The current Conamara range, per its product page, consists of round speakers 5 or 6 millimetres across and about 1.5 millimetres thick, two tweeters and one full-range model, rated waterproof to IPX8 and with response up to 40 kHz for Hi-Res audio. USound is not alone: the US company xMEMS supplies solid-state MEMS drivers that are already in earbuds from brands such as Creative, as TechRadar reported, and in 2022 Bosch Sensortec was in the process of acquiring Arioso Systems, a Fraunhofer spin-off with a rival MEMS speaker design. In 2022 Bottoni told eeNews Europe that USound's speakers were "already on the market" and that Arioso's manufacturing was "complex".

What Digital Speakers Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran from 1 July 2019 to 30 November 2021, after an extension of several months that the company attributed to COVID-19 disruption in its supply chain. The objective on CORDIS describes a company of 58 people, with 37 patent families filed, whose first product, Ganymede, was going into in-ear headphones sold by its Chinese client 3nod. Kore was meant to "exploit piezo MEMS technology to its full capacity": a hexagonal speaker, smaller and louder than Ganymede, and more tightly integrated with its driving electronics. In its July 2019 announcement USound added that Kore would be "the first fully integrated smart speaker with additional functions such as voice fingerprint".

The final report, covering July 2020 to November 2021, is thin on technical detail. It says USound "successfully assembled and tested the new speaker prototype", that Kore would go to market under the product name Conamara, and that the company was "in the middle of full market roll-out" with customer contracts still under negotiation. The CORDIS results page lists no public deliverables or publications.

1. Kore speaker prototypeDeliveredAssembled and tested by November 2021, per the CORDIS report.
2. Market launch as ConamaraDelivered, lateFirst samples in the Kore 4.0 module in March 2023; in mass-market earbuds from August 2025.
3. Hexagonal form factorChangedThe Conamara speakers on sale are round, 5 or 6 mm in diameter.
4. Integrated smart speaker with voice fingerprintNot seenNo product with this function has been announced; sensing work moved to heart rate and ultrasound.
5. High-volume B2B salesUnverifiedCustomers are named, but no volumes or revenue are public.

Measured against what the project set out to build, the result is there: the second-generation speaker exists, is qualified and is in a shipping consumer product. It took nearly four years after the project ended to reach a mainstream earbud. The grant itself appears in USound's own releases as "2 million EUR"; CORDIS gives €1,872,193.75.

What USound Has Achieved Since the Award

The customer list has grown steadily, mostly in China. In November 2022 USound said Luxshare-ICT, a large Chinese assembler for global electronics brands, had chosen it as MEMS speaker supplier for a hybrid earbud module due in mass production in 2023; no earbud using that module has been publicly named. The clearest result came from QCY, a Chinese budget earbud brand owned by Dongguan Hele Electronics, which announced a design win in March 2025. The MeloBuds N70 launched on 28 August 2025 at $59.99 with a Conamara tweeter beside a ring-shaped dynamic driver, according to audioXpress and USound's use case. How many units QCY has sold is not public.

Other named uses are smaller: MRI-compatible headphones for NordicNeuroLab, high-end in-ear monitors from Linsoul, Arisyn and Kiwi Ears, and the iSEE smart glasses for blind and partially sighted users. In September 2025 USound signed a supply agreement under which Gettop, a component maker listed in Shenzhen, will manufacture MEMS speakers from USound's wafers and amplifier chips, with "guaranteed production volumes" that were not disclosed.

The Money

USound has been financed mainly by eQventure, the Graz investor network that its chairman Herbert Gartner co-founded, and by private technology investors. Trending Topics reported a €12 million round in January 2017, when the company had about 30 engineers. A $20 million round followed in November 2018, according to USound's release, and futurezone reported a further $10 million in May 2019, about $2 million of it EU funding. In July 2021 the European Investment Bank signed €15 million of venture debt for USound. In December 2021 USound announced $30 million (€25 million) led by eQventure with Hermann Hauser, BYD co-founder Longzhong Yang and "strong participation" from the EIB, confirmed by eeNews Europe; whether the EIB loan is part of that figure is not stated. In August 2023 came a €10 million growth investment with Andy Bechtolsheim and the management, also reported by Startbase.

The totals disagree. eeNews Europe put the money invested to date at over €68 million in December 2021; Trending Topics wrote in January 2026 that the company had raised more than €90 million in venture capital. Neither figure is broken down, and the rounds above do not add up cleanly to either. Austrian public money came on top: North Data, drawing on the EU state aid register, lists research grants from the Austrian funding agency FFG almost every year, most recently €614,202 in 2022, €663,620 in 2023 and €713,400 for 2024 to 2026.

What the money has produced in revenue is not public. USound files full annual accounts, but they are behind a paywall at the register and at North Data, and the company does not publish turnover. The corrected 2023 accounts filed in February 2026 suggest the first version needed changes; what changed could not be checked. The one public growth measure, headcount, has not moved: 60 employees in November 2018, 58 in the EIC application, "55+" on the website today.

Other EU Projects

Digital speakers was USound's second EIC-pilot grant. In 2016 it received €50,000 for an SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study, MOON-MEMS speaker, which named "SME phase 2" as its next funding goal. Since 2021 it has been a partner in two collaborative projects: AEROMIC, a Clean Sky 2 project coordinated by Silicon Austria Labs on MEMS microphones for aircraft noise measurement (€106,750 for USound, January 2021 to June 2023), and SONICOM, led by Imperial College London on personalised spatial audio for virtual and augmented reality (€132,500 for USound, January 2021 to June 2026). USound is not listed as an EIC Fund holding; the 2019 SME Instrument award was a grant only.

Why Europe Should Care

A magnet-free speaker touches two EU priorities. The Critical Raw Materials Act aims to reduce Europe's dependence on imported rare earths, which go into the permanent magnets of conventional speakers; USound's CORDIS report makes exactly that argument. And the European Chips Act wants more semiconductor design and production in Europe. USound designs in Austria, made its first speakers with STMicroelectronics and in 2022 moved assembly to Elemaster in Lomagna, Italy, under a "Made in Europe" banner.

The market it sells into, however, is in Asia. Its buyers and partners are Chinese earbud makers and assemblers, its amplifier chips come from TSMC in Taiwan, and the Gettop agreement moves speaker manufacturing to a Chinese supplier. That is how consumer audio works, and it is where the volume is. It also means the European value of the EU grant lies in the design and the patents held in Graz rather than in European production.

The Verdict

Two facts could not be settled. Trending Topics wrote in 2017 that USound was founded in 2013, while the register entry and CORDIS give 2014; North Data shows that the GmbH took over a predecessor, USound Technology OG, in June 2014. Patent counts in USound's own statements range from 37 patent families (2019) to "over 500 patents" (2025), counted in different ways. USound has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.