When Eargo CEO Christian Gormsen was approached by the venture capital arm of Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk in 2013 to join a fledgling startup making hearing aids, he says he told them, “I’ve seen all the startup attempts in the hearing aid space, and frankly none of them have been worth the paper that the business plan was written on.
Then he was shown the prototype made by Eargo’s cofounders, Daniel Shen, Florent Michel and Raphael Michel. He was impressed with what they had built. By 2014, Gormsen says, he’d joined as a board member, and by 2016 he’d decided to come on as CEO. Gormsen says Eargo has sold hearing aids to over 20,000 people since launching commercially in 2017.
The Food & Drug Administration estimates that some 37.5 million people over 18 in the U.S. need a hearing aid, and the World Health Organization estimates that some 466 million need them around the world and 900 million will require them by 2050. For the past several decades, the market has been dominated by six big manufacturers: Starkey Hearing Technologies, GN Store Nord, Sonova, Sivantos, William Demant and Widex. They often sell their hearing aids to middlemen, that is, audiologists, who test patients’ hearing and fit them with hearing aids patients in a brick-and-mortar store. The average cost of a hearing aid is $2,300, according to a 2015 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
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