Last updated August 24, 2026

Anoria

Building a wearable that reads emotions to improve emotional intelligence.

WearablesNeurotechMental health

Emotional health is difficult to measure in daily life. People often notice stress, anxiety, or emotional overload only after it has already affected their behavior, relationships, or performance.

Anoria is building a designed to read emotional signals and help users improve emotional intelligence. Its approach aims to turn physiological and behavioral data into feedback that helps people better understand and manage their emotional state.

Key Investor Signals

Selected for Y Combinator Spring 2026

Anoria was selecterd to join Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch.

Early prototypes already in real-world use

Within two months of development, a small group of users was wearing Anoria's first prototypes and testing its real-time Flow Score across conversations, apps, meetings, and music.

Founder previously led hardware design work at Apple

Michael Belhassen spent five years designing iPhones at Apple and most recently led enclosure work for the iPhone 17 Pro, bringing directly relevant consumer-hardware execution experience.

Other Positive Signals

  • Built a five-person team that includes former Apple and Meta engineers and repeat founders.
  • Named by Inc. as one of five companies to watch from YC's Spring 2026 batch.

Team

Michael Belhassen

Founder

  • Former iPhone Product Design Engineer at Apple, with 5 years designing iPhones, including recent work on the iPhone 17 Pro enclosure.
  • Built consumer-hardware experience at Apple, where iPhone products ship at 100M+ unit scale.
  • 10-year focus on understanding and quantifying human emotion, directly aligned with Anoria's emotion-reading wearable.
  • Holds a Master of Engineering from Imperial College London.

Product

Anoria is developing a bracelet that uses audio and biometric signals to infer the wearer's emotional state. It translates these inputs into a real-time Flow Score covering energy, mood, and focus, helping users understand how their state changes throughout the day.

Audio and biometric sensing

Anoria's wearable is designed to capture approximately 150 audio and biometric signals. Its model analyses these inputs to infer changes in the wearer's emotional state.

Real-time Flow Score

The product converts sensor data into a score covering energy, mood, and focus. This gives users a simpler interpretation of their state rather than a collection of raw measurements.

Daily emotional feedback

Anoria is designed to surface emotional changes during everyday activities and interactions. The feedback aims to help users recognise patterns earlier and develop greater emotional self-awareness.

Market Overview

Consumers already use wearables to track sleep, recovery, and physical activity, but emotional state is still measured mainly through self-reporting. Journals, therapy sessions, and wellness apps depend on users noticing and describing how they feel rather than detecting changes continuously.

Anoria sits between consumer wearables and mental wellness. Workplace stress creates a broad audience beyond people with a formal diagnosis, while growth in wearables and mental health apps shows demand for daily self-management tools. The opportunity is to make emotional state measurable in the same way wearables made sleep and heart rate part of everyday health tracking.

Global mental health burden
1.1B

People globally living with a mental disorder in 2021, with anxiety and depression among the most common conditions.

Daily employee stress
40%

Share of employees globally who experienced stress during much of the previous day.

Global wearable technology market
$92.9B → $229.9B

Projected market growth from 2025 to 2033.

Global mental health apps market
$7.48B → $17.52B

Projected market growth from 2024 to 2030, representing a 14.6% compound annual growth rate.

Comparable Outcomes

Emotion AI Platform

Affectiva

$73.5M acquisition

developed Emotion AI technology designed to analyze human emotional and cognitive states from facial and behavioral signals. Its platform was used in areas such as media analytics, , and . acquired Affectiva for $73.5 million to strengthen its human behavior and interior sensing capabilities, creating a larger platform for understanding human states through AI.

Biometric Behavior Platform

iMotions

$46.6M acquisition + up to ~$5.8M earn-out

developed a multi-sensor software platform for studying human behavior. Its system combined data from biosensors such as eye tracking, facial expression analysis, sweat gland activity, brain activity, and heart rate to generate emotional, cognitive, and behavioral insights. Smart Eye acquired iMotions for $46.6 million, excluding a potential earn-out of up to approximately $5.8 million.

Consumer Health Wearable

Oura

$11B valuation + $1B revenue in 2025

built a consumer smart ring that tracks biometric signals such as sleep, heart rate, temperature, activity, and readiness. The product turned continuous personal health monitoring into a mainstream consumer category. Oura reached $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and was valued at $11 billion ahead of its expected IPO, showing large-scale demand for wearable products that translate physiological data into personal health feedback.

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Sources

This profile was built from public company materials, ecosystem sources, market references, and professional profiles.

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