Robin Cao spent eight years at Apple building haptic feedback for the iPhone and the Apple Watch. In 2020 he left to start Mojawa, a bone conduction headphone maker based in Suzhou. This week the company closed a Series A+ round of tens of millions of yuan led by Zhenghai Capital, the company said, with proceeds earmarked for expanding overseas sales channels and advancing its push into AI-driven wearables, according to 36Kr.
The round is a bet on a niche that is suddenly crowded: open-ear audio, the segment of the headphone market that leaves the ear canal unblocked, has grown rapidly as runners, cyclists, and swimmers discovered bone conduction sound. Mojawa’s pitch is that its technology comes from a different lineage than its rivals’ – vibration engineering for haptics, not audio acoustics – and that difference, the company argues, is its way past the patent walls the category leaders have built.
An unusual technology route
Mojawa was founded in 2020 by Cao and operates under Suzhou Suoer Electronic Technology, with backing from Thor Innovation, a vibration-engineering firm whose technology spans haptics, bone conduction vibration units, and audio-haptic integration.
That background shapes the product approach. Mojawa’s core technology is a proprietary wide-frequency vibration system, originally developed for haptic feedback in applications like VR controllers and smart cockpits, adapted to drive bone conduction audio. The company says this approach improves low-frequency response – the bass, in other words – which has traditionally been the weak point of bone conduction sound. Its patented magnetic levitation bass vibrator is the physical embodiment of that idea: a driver that reproduces the low end through vibration rather than through conventional acoustic tuning.
The route also has a strategic purpose. The bone conduction market’s leaders hold dense patent portfolios around their acoustic and transducer designs, and new entrants that follow the conventional technical path face litigation risk from day one. By building on haptics-derived vibration technology instead, Mojawa claims it sidesteps the incumbents’ patent moat while differentiating on the one thing buyers actually complain about: sound quality, particularly bass.
The funding and what it buys
The Series A+ round, led by Zhenghai Capital, adds to earlier backing that took the company through product launches in China and its first overseas push. The proceeds are earmarked for two priorities. The first is overseas distribution: open-ear audio has its strongest demand in North America and Europe, where running culture and open-plan offices have driven the category’s growth, and Mojawa wants retail presence rather than cross-border e-commerce listings. The second is AI: the company’s longer-term ambition is to turn its headphones into an AI sports intelligence platform, using the sensors that sit naturally against the wearer’s head for biometric tracking and real-time coaching.
The market opportunity is real and quantified. Analysts project the global bone conduction headphone market will grow from about $1.28 billion in 2024 to more than $8.15 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate of 22.8 percent. Mojawa’s current lineup – including the lightweight Run Air and the feature-rich Terra with heart-rate monitoring, plus the newer Purra Flow with real-time training guidance – shows the direction of travel: from audio hardware toward fitness wearables that happen to play music.
Why it matters
Mojawa is a small player in a market led by much larger names, and the Series A+ is a modest round by global standards. But the pattern it represents is increasingly common in consumer hardware: a founder with deep experience at a giant tech company, a technical approach that deliberately avoids the incumbents’ patents, and a funding thesis that treats headphones as a sensor platform rather than an audio accessory. If the AI layer works – if the headphones can deliver coaching and biometric insights that users pay for – the hardware becomes the entry point to a subscription business. If it does not, Mojawa remains a competent audio brand competing on bass in a crowded market.
The round also signals that investors still see whitespace in open-ear audio: the category’s largest players built their lead on sports headphones, and Mojawa is targeting the gap between those entry-level sports products and the premium segment, with features like heart-rate monitoring built into the hardware. Timing helps as well – the company is pushing overseas just as the category’s growth curve bends upward, and Zhenghai Capital’s backing gives it the credibility with foreign retail partners that small Chinese hardware brands often lack.
Mojawa’s bet is that haptics-bred vibration technology can beat the acoustic establishment at its own game, and that AI can turn a headphone into something closer to a fitness coach. The funding gives it the runway to test both claims in overseas markets where the category is growing fastest. The patent strategy matters as much as the products: in a market where the leaders litigate aggressively, the technical route is the moat.
