Nura sounds a warning to global headphone giants

Melbourne headphone outfit Nura has cemented its place as Australia’s most successful Kickstarter project.

Nura co-founder and chief executive Kyle Slater.

Melbourne headphone outfit Nura has cemented its place as Australia’s most successful Kickstarter project, and co-founder and chief executive Kyle Slater says the company is now finally at a place where it can start plotting its next step.

Nura started life as a Melbourne Accelerator Program entrant in 2015, and now has 16 employees employed full-time out of its Melbourne office, all working hard on delivering the company’s vision — a self-learning headphone that auto-tunes to your hearing. The company raised $1.8 million in its Kickstarter project — the largest in Australian history — before raising a further $5m seed round in March 2017 led by Blackbird Ventures, SOS Ventures and Qualgro VC.

“We had to change our internal technology radically from our first version,” Mr Slater told The Australian. “Originally we were offering just lightning connectivity, no Bluetooth, and no micro-USB, but we surveyed the backer community and asked what connectivity options they’d like.

“I’m glad we did, and there were a lot of challenges along the way but our backer community has been very supportive, we’ve been very fortunate.”

Nura’s Nuraphones are unique not just for their universal connectivity, but also their patented self-learning engine, which auto­matically measures your hearing and “sonically moulds” the music for your ears. Also in what is probably an industry first, the headphones feature both in-ear buds and over-ear cups, a decision Mr Slater said was all about sound quality.

To ensure the manufacturing process went smoothly, the Nura team relocated to China for six months, and Mr Slater said the resulting product was one the company was happy with.

“We’ve almost fulfilled all our Australian orders, and we’re in the process of shipping the rest of the orders before Christmas,” he said.

“We have an idea of what we want to do next year, but for the Nuraphone product itself we want to introduce some enhanced features, via firmware updates.

“It’s totally upgradeable like a Tesla car. We won’t be releasing any self-driving features, but we will have some very exciting technologies on the way to improve the music experience.”

Mr Slater said it was exciting being one of only a handful of Australian consumer audio brands, and one that was competing with the likes of Bose and Sony on a global stage.

“We have had a lot of accomplishments, but I see the product itself as our greatest accomplishment,” he said.

As for future products, Mr Slater said he would not rule out doing another Kickstarter campaign, but said he saw the benefit as mostly being able to take an idea and build it into a real company.

“For us, maybe it might be a more traditional route in the ­future,” he said.