Want This Hearing Aid? Well, Who Do You Know?

“I’ve tried different brands of hearing aids, and they’re good, but they’re not this good,” says Martin in a Zoom interview. He visited the team in Soho, did the street test, and was delighted when he tried it with his wife and daughter at their favorite restaurant, with de Jonge sitting with the laptop several tables away. But the clincher for Martin was a cocktail party.

“I was here in our building, and I was at a party upstairs, and I had my old hearing aids in,” he says. “I’m sitting talking to four people, and I realized I can’t understand any of them, and I go, wait, I have these new hearing aids. I went downstairs, put them in, came back, and I could hear everyone.” Now he wears them all the time, and even made a joke about hearing aids on Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special. “I don’t really think about the way it used to be,” he says. “I used to dread going to a restaurant, and now I don’t.” His friend Balaban, once he got into the beta test, is similarly smitten. “This is a significant improvement over the absurdly pricey devices I’d been using,” Balaban says.

Other machers aren’t public, but de Jonge assures me they are mostly names invoked in boldface type. Since there are only a few dozen beta units, this means that some powerful people have been shuttled to a waiting list. Balaban’s wife, Lynn Grossman, recounts attending a Labor Day dinner with over 100 people, generally of a certain age, in a private room in a restaurant, thinking that her husband and another guy—a famous CEO in the fashion world—were the only ones who could hear, because of Fortell. “After, I think Bob got 12 or 14 emails saying, ‘How do I get those hearing aids?’”

Now that the product is launched, Fortell will sell hearing aids in a single clinic on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. It’s decked out like a posh lounge, with the devices on display in a tasteful presentation that’s straight out of the Apple retail playbook. Hanging on the wall is a silicon wafer with the circuitry of the custom chips. In the early stages, his staff of four audiologists will serve only a couple of dozen customers a week, to make sure everything goes smoothly. In any case, while ramping up production, the supply will be limited.

This is great for Fortell, but it seems de Jonge’s initial impulse to usher everyone’s grandparents into the land of the hearing is in danger of being limited to the one percent, which doesn’t exactly qualify him for a Salk medal. When I ask de Jonge how his invention can scale to change life for the masses, his replies, whether due to secrecy on future plans or just not having a good answer, seem hand-wavy. In his defense, Fortell has resisted the temptation to jack up the traditional price of premium hearing aids—the $6,800 is actually a bit less than some other medically prescribed hearing aids. (As with other high-end hearing aids, the price is part of a package that includes fitting and support from professional audiologists.) Still, even that defensible price tag limits adoption; it’s a sad fact that some Medicare and many health insurance plans do not cover hearing aids, a policy that dooms millions to an aural bardo of conversational exclusion, isolating them from loved ones and hastening dementia.

It’s unclear whether Fortell technology might find its way into the less expensive over-the-counter hearing aids available today, which became possible via a Biden-era shift in regulation. These include Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 devices and entries from other consumer electronics brands, which are generally known to help those with hearing loss but not as much as high-end devices that are paired with professional support. The Fortell proposition requires careful testing and tuning, continuing for some time as wearers get used to the devices. In any case, that white-glove approach will consume Fortell’s efforts for the next year and more. Expansion will come by opening clinics in a few select cities, and only later will Fortell consider scaling to allow others to sell the technology.