ATitan is a wireless audio company I co-founded with my friend Cayden Colasse. We’re building hardware and software that brings Auracast — a new Bluetooth LE Audio standard — to existing speakers and audio systems. This is the story of how we got here.

How it started

Cayden and I met my junior year of high school when I moved to Santa Barbara from the Bay Area. From the start we had a dynamic where we were always looking for opportunities to build something together. We kicked around app ideas — one was a social media aggregator that would unify all your platforms into one — but nothing stuck because we had other priorities.

Senior year of college, Cayden was still chewing on this concept of unifying services and devices. He wanted to create a device that could stream audio to multiple Bluetooth speakers simultaneously. I wasn’t sure it was technically possible, but we kept talking about it. Cayden brought in his friend Alex, and the three of us started exploring how something like this could actually be built.

That’s when Alex found LE Audio — specifically Auracast, a Bluetooth standard that enables one-to-many audio broadcasting. It was exactly what Cayden had been describing. The technology had only come to fruition within the previous year, and documentation was extremely limited.

Getting our hands dirty

We located the Nordic nRF5340 chipset, which was capable of BLE broadcasts, and ordered some devkits. Alex, being a computer engineer, took on designing custom hardware. I took on firmware. We divided and started building.

We quickly discovered how hard this was actually going to be.

Alex completed a PCB design and we got a small batch manufactured, but a voltage issue meant the device wouldn’t power on. On my side, firmware for a single-core embedded processor proved extremely complex — managing memory and compute constraints on bare metal is no joke.

Alex eventually dropped the project. I almost did too, but stuck around.

Finding the team

We located an angel investor who gave us $100k to continue, which we badly needed. Without Alex, Cayden found contractor support abroad for hardware, and I went hunting for firmware help. I wrote a detailed specification of the firmware functionality we needed and vetted over 50 candidates I found on Discord and Reddit.

Then one night I connected with someone who instantly clicked. We hopped on a call — his name is Ark, and he’s from Poland. He told me he’d always wanted to be part of a startup and that he was ready to lead rather than follow. We brought him on officially, paid him (not enough), and offered equity. Ark is the one who really brought the device to life.

Everything started converging. We got a second round of PCBs manufactured. Ark helped define hardware requirements and found a peer reviewer for the board design. The rest of the team came together around this time too:

  • Christian — Mobile Software Engineer
  • Matthew — Web Development
  • Moshe — Business Development
  • Joaquin — Operations
  • Makai — Marketing

Eight people total, building something from scratch.

CES 2026

Cayden told me about the opportunity to get a startup booth at CES. It sounded exciting, but nothing was ready — and CES was three months out.

This became grind time. Firmware was working, but switching between transmit and receive modes wasn’t stable. Marketing materials were in early stages. Everything needed to come together fast.

The night before the first day of CES was actually the first time we were able to solder batteries to the boards and push final firmware changes for demonstration. The devices were hanging on by a thread. Due to a power management firmware issue — we were using different batteries than Ark had been testing with (he was unable to make it to the US for CES) — the batteries couldn’t charge. Once a device died, it was done. Thankfully each unit gets 13-16 hours of battery life, but we still had to be careful to make 6 devices last the full 4 days.

Cayden pulled through on the presentation side — banners, t-shirts, the whole booth setup. We looked extremely professional. The whole team came out to man the booth, though Cayden and I handled most of the demos since we were the only ones who knew the device inside and out well enough to explain it accurately. We barely saw the rest of the convention — next year we plan to coordinate the team better so everyone gets that chance.

The reception was incredible. We connected with audio engineers, integrators, and everyday consumers. Palmer Luckey stopped by the booth to check out the device. The Verge covered our Auracast transceiver. We got additional press from Aurahear. For a team of eight with hand-soldered prototypes, it was a serious validation moment.

What we’re building

The core product is splitR — a standalone, battery-powered device that transmits, receives, and bridges wired and wireless audio over Auracast. Plug it into any speaker with an aux input and that speaker joins the Auracast network. No wires between devices, no Wi-Fi required, no replacing your existing equipment.

The real technical challenge is synchronization. Getting tight, coherent playback across multiple speakers with different hardware characteristics — different preprocessing, different DSP — requires algorithmic correction at the firmware level. That’s where the hard engineering lives.

On the software side, connectR is our app that unifies Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, and SoundCloud into a single interface. You queue music from any service, manage your connected speakers, and control group listening sessions — all from one place. It also works offline when paired with splitR for local broadcasting.

What’s next

Right now we’re pushing a hardware revision — adding Wi-Fi, NFC, and improving the enclosure design — and preparing for an April Kickstarter. We’re targeting both consumer and commercial markets:

  • Consumer — ad-hoc surround sound from existing speakers, multiroom audio, home theatre
  • Commercial — accessibility audio in public spaces, alternative language streams in venues, personalized audio for museums and places of worship
  • Bridging the gap — bringing a technology that hasn’t hit the mainstream yet to people who want it, and to people who don’t know yet that they want it

In three years I see ATitan growing into a full ecosystem around splitR — dedicated devices to receive and play, hardware to extend broadcast range, and tools to synchronize audio across increasingly complex environments. Auracast is the future of wireless audio. We’re just making sure people can actually use it today.