sensiBel, an EIC Scaling Club member in the Next-Gen Computing category, has been awarded with two prestigious consumer electronics awards – the SoundGuys Best of CES 2026 Awards, and the EDN Electronic Products 2025 Product of the Year Awards.

sensiBel is a Norwegian optical MEMS sensor company delivering the next generation of studio-quality MEMS microphones. What stands out about them immediately is their miniature size – it looks small even when balanced on the tip of your finger. But the quality sound is what sets them apart from competitors.

“Billions of MEMS microphones are shipping in smartphones, headphones and earbuds, laptops, wearables, and countless other devices - but not one of them matches the high-fidelity audio of the condenser-style microphones used over the last 50-100 years,” said Kieran Harney, CEO, sensiBel. “The SBM100B is the first MEMS microphone to break that performance barrier. As the only MEMS mic to use interferometry-based optical sensing technology, it delivers 80dB SNR with wide dynamic range in a compact, production-ready format.

SoundGuys Best of CES Awards

The company was at CES, one of the world’s most important consumer electronics trade shows, and so were SoundGuys. SoundGuys is an independent online publication that is a voice of consumer audio users across the world. As part of a wider network–which reaches over

30 million passionate technology enthusiasts every month, the SoundGuys team is looked to to provide insight on the latest products and offer in-depth analysis, news, reviews and more. After visiting many stands and evaluating what’s on offer, the SoundGuys were able to narrow down the competition and name their favourites.

In describing the process, the company said “sensiBel invited SoundGuys’ Adam Birney and Harley Maranan to experience a demo at our suite at The Venetian during CES 2026 in Las Vegas. We sent advance materials to them. With Kieran Harney and Tom Hazlett in support, Mike Tuttle demonstrated the superior acoustic performance of the SBM100B in various use cases.”

The SoundGuys were impressed. This is what they had to say about the technology:

“The implications are significant. Smartphone microphones, laptop mics, conferencing systems, wireless earbuds, and gaming headsets could all benefit from dramatically improved audio capture without increasing size or cost. This is the kind of foundational technology that doesn’t generate immediate consumer excitement but could meaningfully improve audio quality across dozens of product categories over the next few years. If sensiBel’s optical MEMS technology delivers on its promises at scale, we might look back at CES 2026 as the moment microphone technology took a big leap forward.”

You can see their video recap of CES award winners here:

One major award isn't enough

A few weeks later, the sensiBel team heard back that they had also won the EDN Electronic Products 2025 Product of the Year Awards.

sensiBel had submitted the SBM100B and POLARIS in this annual awards competition, which is hosted by one of the leading electronics-industry publications: EDN. It is a legacy platform, and the awards celebrated their 50th anniversary.

According to EDN, the awards recognize outstanding products that represent any of the following qualities: a significant advancement in a technology or its application, an exceptionally innovative design, a substantial achievement in price/performance, improvements in design performance, and a potential for new product designs/opportunities.

Winning the award is particularly prestigious, as the team pointed out:

“There are many entries from a global list of companies. There was no fee to apply, and we applied in the “sensors and transducers” category. It is unusual for a startup to win one of these awards. We submitted on November 4, 2025 and learned on February 3, 2026 that sensiBel had won for the SBM100B.”

EDN praised sensiBel’s innovation:

“Leveraging its patented optical sensing technology, the SBM100B achieves performance significantly surpassing anything that is available on the market today, according to the company. It delivers the same audio recording quality that users experience with professional studio microphones but in a small-form-factor microphone.

The 80-dB SNR delivers cleaner audio, reducing hiss and preserving clarity in quiet recordings. It is a significant achievement in noise and dynamic range performance for MEMS microphones, and it’s a level of audio performance that capacitive and piezo MEMS microphone technologies cannot match.”

Join us in congratulating sensiBel for their achievements!

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120 European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120 European deep tech companies have been carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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