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Eventag has won an EXIST Business Start-up Grant in Germany and opened a waitlist for Sentien, its ambient-audio context platform.
The federal grant supports founders building companies out of universities and will fund Eventag's work on AI systems that turn ambient sound into structured information.
Founded by Abin Jacob and Vaibhav Kumar, the Oldenburg spin-off emerged from research at the University of Oldenburg. Both founders are from India and are building the business in Germany.
The work began with a problem in neuroscience. Researchers increasingly collect brain data outside controlled lab settings, where it can be difficult to know what a participant was seeing or hearing at a given moment.
Eventag's first product was designed for that setting. Its wearable is a battery-powered device worn by study participants that detects events in their surroundings from ambient audio and writes a marker for each event directly into EEG electrode channels as it happens.
Because the marker becomes part of the brain recording, researchers can align external events with brain activity without relying on separate software clocks. The device is designed to work alongside existing EEG systems rather than replace them.
Beyond Research
The grant will help Eventag extend that work beyond neuroscience. Its Sentien platform processes ambient audio into structured descriptions of what is happening around a device or person.
These descriptions are organised in layers, including individual sound events, acoustic features, the broader sound scene, and the activity taking place. Applications can use that information to interpret nearby conditions and adjust their responses.
The platform does not store or retain raw audio. Eventag is positioning Sentien for use in wearables and biosignal research, AI agents, robotics, smart spaces, and safety and monitoring systems.
One example is a health monitoring wearable that could distinguish between a raised heart rate during exercise and the same reading while a user is sitting in a quiet room. Another is a home robot that changes its behaviour when people are talking nearby.
Eventag is in early discussions with companies in the United States, Europe and India about adding this kind of context to their products. Those talks include wearable and neurotechnology makers, as well as teams working on elderly care and health monitoring.
The grant period runs from January to December 2027. During that time, the startup plans to run its first pilots with partners and open Sentien to teams on the waitlist.
Abin Jacob, co-founder and chief executive officer of Eventag, said: "Our starting point was a very specific challenge: understanding brain activity recorded in the real world. We realised that the same missing piece affects many technologies. Systems can collect signals and process data, but they often lack the context needed to understand what is actually happening. We want to make that context accessible as a building block for intelligent technology."
Jacob is a neuroscientist and doctoral researcher at the University of Oldenburg. Kumar has worked in B2B growth and venture capital for seven years.
Vaibhav Kumar, co-founder and chief operating officer of Eventag, said: "We see an opportunity to move beyond technologies that simply detect individual signals towards systems that can interpret the situations behind them. Sentien is our first step towards making that capability accessible to the teams building the next generation of intelligent products."
The company is part of the GO! Startup Incubator at TGO Oldenburg. Martin Bleichner, DFG Heisenberg professor at the University of Oldenburg, is its scientific advisor.