Vietnam’s deep-tech firm attracts investments from financiers

Earable Neuroscience’s flagship is FRENZ BrainBand, the wearable device with the ability to monitor brain activities and improve sleep quality and concentration.

The word ‘FRENZ’, according to Vu Ngoc Tam, the founder of Earable Neuroscience, comes from the ancient Greek term "Phren" which means the brain area responsible for forming consciousness, from which ideas appear. ‘Phren’ has been stylized a little, and changed into "FRENZ", so that the product not only means ‘brain’, but also ‘a friend of the brain’.

2022 was an eventful year for Earable Neuroscience. Though the world economy was in tough conditions, the firm still found it easy to raise funds. A lot of investors showed interest in the company’s product. In some cases, the amount of capital they suggested was even higher than expected.

Meanwhile, the first investors of Earable Neuroscience, such as Founders Fund and Smilegate Investment, increased their investment capital by many times. They were ready to introduce other investors. Samsung Ventures was one of them. Also, Earable Neuroscience received capital from a British fund and Excelpoint from Singapore.

Excelpoint is known as a large company specializing in providing electronic components in Asia Pacific with the value of several billions of dollars. In general, it only cooperates with large firms.

During a business visit to Vietnam in February 2022, Tam Vu met Excelpoint’s president Albert Phuay. When visiting Earable Neuroscience’s head office, Phuay said he had when entering Earable Neuroscience’s office was exactly the same feeling he had the same feeling when visiting Lenovo’s office many years ago, when it was a very small company in China. He was impressed by the hard working, creative staff, from the founder to engineers.

Excelpoint won’t repeat the mistake it once made with Lenovo. Excelpoint regretted that it refused to invest in Lenovo and is not going to do the same thing with Earable Neuroscience.

In the case of Samsung Ventures, Earable had to go through an extremely rigorous Due Diligence process from the investor. Samsung Ventures sent specialists to Vietnam to talk directly with Earable’s leadership, assess the company, and try the product for three consecutive days. It also raised questions about Earable’s marketing and sale plans.

2022 was the year when the first products were delivered to consumers in the US and Vietnam. This was an important milestone in the development history of the company after it spent 8-9 years of research.

It was also the year of bountiful awards for Earable Neuroscience: it won CES Innovation Awards 2023 and Red Dot Design Award 2023, while FRENZ product was displayed at Red Dot technology museum in Germany and Singapore.

Earable’s product is deserving of the awards, especially with good user experiences. When Earable’s managers came to the Republic of Korea to work with Samsung’s leadership, one of the senior vice presidents of the group, who had been undergoing a long period of insomnia, showed special interest in the product when hearing the presentation about Earable’s core technology and the things that FRENZ could do.

One of the requirements set by Samsung on Earable’s product is that it must be sold in the Korean market as well, not only in the US, Europe and Vietnam as initially planned. This shows the investor’s high expectations.

In 2021-2022, Earable gathered strength on developing the core technology. After of improvements and experiments, Earable was perfected as expected.

The exclusive dry sensors used on FRENZ have accuracy and stability after thousands of sleep sessions. FRENZ's bone conduction speakers sound better with higher volume.

The FRENZ app on iOS is running smoothly, with 5S feature integrated and showing the ‘smartness’ of FRENZ. The FRENZ app on Android has been implemented.

FRENZ is a special product. It is both soft and smart. In general, it is easy to find hard-smart product (watches, smartphones and headphones), but it is not easy to find soft-smart product.

Earable plans to expand its staff to 120. It also plans to relocate its office to Boston and build sales staff in the US market.