Fortell Hearing Aids: What Is Actually Known So Far

Fortell is a New York hearing aid company that launched in December 2025 and has since raised $163 million at a $740 million valuation, been profiled by Wired and the New York Times, and named to Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups. Its founders came from Butterfly Network. The device costs $6,800 a pair and is sold only at Fortell's own clinics, fitted by audiologists Fortell employs.

Why this concerns Westchester now. Most coverage frames Fortell as something arriving later, in cities that are still waitlists. That is not the position here. Two of its three open clinics are at 530 Park Avenue and on Greenwich Avenue, which puts one a short drive east of Harrison and the other a train ride south. Patients in this county can be fitted this month if they choose to be, with no waitlist involved. We would rather they went into that decision informed than discover the terms afterwards.

We should also declare our position, because you should weigh what follows accordingly. Fortell does not supply independent practices and has no intention of doing so, which makes this a competitor writing about a competitor. We have tried to write it the way we would want somebody to write about us.

The idea. Nearly every hearing aid advertising artificial intelligence works by classifying the room and adjusting to suit: this is a restaurant, so narrow the microphones and pull the noise down. Fortell's position is that classification is the wrong level to work at, and that the device should instead separate the individual sound sources and rebuild the mixture with the voices you want brought forward. That is source separation, the technique behind the noise suppression on a video call, and the reason it has not appeared in hearing aids before is delay. An aid that lags the room makes your own voice sound wrong and stops lips matching sound. Fortell built its own chip to get the delay to roughly ten milliseconds, which is inside the window where most wearers stop noticing. Whatever one makes of the marketing, this is a genuine engineering position rather than last year's processing renamed.

Following the evidence. The homepage claims the world's most intelligent hearing aid, up to 98 per cent of background noise eliminated, and ten times more words understood. Behind those sit two studies, both posted as PDFs on Fortell's own site. The second, dated May 2026, is described by the company as published in the International Journal of Audiology; we went looking and could not find it indexed anywhere outside Fortell's site, so we record it as unverified rather than disputed. Neither study names its comparator devices or states a sample size. Three things then gave us pause. The headline figure has moved: in January the company told a journalist the intelligibility study showed 9.2 dB of improvement against a named Phonak comparator, where the site now reports 17 dB against an unnamed one. The ten-times claim is not supported by Fortell's own posted outcomes, which show 80 per cent against 31 per cent word recognition in difficult noise, a ratio nearer two and a half. And the NYU researcher quoted on the homepage saying he had never seen so categorical a result also noted, in the same reporting, that the test configuration was particularly good at showing the product's advantages. That sentence does not appear in the marketing. None of this makes the device poor. It means the published evidence is company-controlled, internally inconsistent in places, and at $6,800 you are entitled to notice.

Nor has anyone outside the company measured it. HearAdvisor, whose standardised bench measurements are the nearest thing this field has to a neutral referee, does not list Fortell; its lead has said publicly that prototypes were tested and are legitimate, with published data still to come, which is a meaningful signal from someone with no reason to flatter a startup, but it is not a measurement. There is nothing in Hearing Review, nothing in The Hearing Journal, no review from Doctor Cliff, none from HearingTracker's Matthew Allsop. For a company with this much mainstream press, essentially the whole professional discussion is happening in a single forum thread.

The exclusions. Three, and for some readers they settle it before performance enters into it. There is no telecoil, so if you use loop systems the device cannot receive them, and no amount of processing substitutes for that. The app is iPhone-only with no Android version, which is a hard exclusion rather than an inconvenience. And Front Voices, the noise-elimination mode the marketing is built around, has to be switched on by hand rather than engaging when a room turns difficult. Then the one that surprises people most: Fortell is out of network with every insurer. It will hand you paperwork to submit yourself and nothing further. If you hold hearing aid benefits through an employer plan, a union, or a Medicare Advantage rider, that is real money the model gives you no way to use.

What is good about it. We would rather say this plainly than bury it. Building custom silicon to get latency low enough for source separation is not a thing companies do for marketing reasons. The advisory board, which includes Stanford and NYU Langone audiology, is not decorative. The price is honest in a way much of this industry is not: $6,800 covering five years of care, a three-year warranty and a hundred-day trial is a clear bundled number, and plenty of practices charge more for less while being vaguer about it. And the most useful single data point we found is not Fortell's. An independent audiologist described fitting a patient with these devices, then running real-ear measurement and verifying directionality, and reported the result was accurate and the patient delighted. One case proves nothing statistically. But it is exactly the check we would run, done by someone with no stake in the answer, and it came out well.

What we can and cannot do. We cannot sell you a Fortell device and we cannot service one; the company does not supply practices like ours, by design. Two things we can do cost you nothing. If you are holding a quote from anywhere, Fortell included, we will give you a second opinion on it, which means a conversation about whether the device suits your audiogram and the rooms you actually struggle in, not a pitch for something else. And if you already wear aids fitted elsewhere, we will verify them with real-ear measurement: a probe microphone in the canal measuring what the device delivers against your prescription across pitches. First-fit settings routinely land well under target, and an unverified premium aid can easily be beaten by a carefully verified mid-range one. That check is worth having whoever fitted you. We fit Phonak, Oticon, Signia, Starkey, ReSound and Widex at Harrison and Somers, which is the real difference between an independent practice and a single-product clinic: no manufacturer's marketing can wrong-foot us, because none of them pays our rent.