Q3 Tweener Founder Spotlights: Xander
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Tweener Founder Spotlights
Before any breakthrough becomes a product, it starts as a story. It’s someone struggling, adapting, or slipping through the cracks of a world not built for them. Those stories often sound small, but they add up to something profound, and they’re what pushed Xander from an idea into a mission.
When Marilyn Morgan Westner and Alex Westner talk about Xander, they don’t start with specs or sensors. They start with people.
A veteran who “faded to black” in every conversation until he put on their glasses.
A young man with a rare tumor who lost his hearing overnight and stopped leaving the house.
A husband in an ER, only able to advocate for his wife because his glasses could “hear” what he couldn’t.
Xander builds real-time captioning glasses for people with severe hearing loss or speech-processing challenges. But under the hood, the product is really about something more basic and more universal: the right to stay in the conversation.
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Real-time captions, real human connection
Lessons You’ll Hear Between the Lines
Marilyn and Alex are very “no gloss” when you ask what they’ve learned:
Fundraising never really stops. Keeping investor conversations warm and ongoing is a core discipline.
Small dependencies can become big risks. For a long time, there was only one manufacturer in the world making glasses that met their specs. That relationship works, but can be risky
Experience + empathy beats pure tech. Decades of audio tech, design thinking, and deep, natural empathy show up in every product decision.
You are not alone in feeling alone. The crushing self-doubt, the imposter syndrome when you see a 23-year-old raise $8M on LinkedIn, the emotional whiplash… that’s normal. Hearing that from other founders early helped them keep going.
And the most important lesson: don’t design in a bubble. Their biggest wins came from being present with users.
“Be My Ears”: Where the Idea Came From
During their early user discovery work, Marilyn and Alex kept hearing the same story: people with hearing loss could follow conversations on TV or their phones thanks to captions, but the moment they stepped into the real world, that support disappeared.
People told them:
“I look at the person speaking, but I still can’t understand the words.”
“I rely on captions, why can’t I have them everywhere?”
“Holding my phone up between us feels awkward. I want to stay present.”
That disconnect became impossible to ignore. If captions unlock understanding, why did they stop the moment someone needed them most?
In early 2020, Marilyn and Alex began building a tool that would restore conversational connection, not by replacing hearing, but by supplementing it. A way to bring real-time captions into everyday life.
Not “Be My Eyes,” but rather Be My Ears.
Marilyn and Alex at the 2025 NC Assistive Tech Expo
Who Xander Serves (and Why It’s So Hard)
Xander is built primarily for people who:
Have severe hearing loss or auditory processing disorders
Often lost their hearing suddenly or later in life
Don’t know sign language and live in a “hearing world”
Want to stay engaged, employed, social and safe
Marilyn and Alex quickly learned that hearing loss isn’t a simple on/off switch. Many people can hear some sound but struggle specifically with speech. Voices become a kind of muffled “Charlie Brown teacher” noise: you know someone’s speaking, but you can’t understand them.
That gap between sound and understanding is where isolation creeps in. It’s not just about clarity of sound; it’s about isolation, identity, and mental health.
“Many people get really embarrassed because they can’t hear,” Marilyn says. “They either talk over other people all the time because they want to stay engaged, or they retreat and stop doing things. The more you don’t do anything… you lose confidence, and that just feeds this downward spiral.”
Xander’s captioning glasses give people a way back into the flow of conversation: hands-free, heads-up, able to look at the person in front of them instead of staring down at a phone.
Designing for Dignity, Not Just Devices
When Marilyn talks about why they are the right team to solve this, she keeps coming back to one idea: technology that complicates your life is the opposite of accessibility.
Their guiding principles are simple but uncompromising:
It just has to work.
“If you have a device and you’re depending on it to communicate, the last thing you want to do is have to pair it to something, fiddle with it, hope you have Wi-Fi. You just need it to work wherever you go.”It has to be private.
“You never know what somebody’s going to tell you,” Marilyn says. “They could be sharing something very personal and private. Other solutions capture that data and store it and train AI on it… I don’t think that’s okay. We don’t store anything. It’s like having a conversation. It goes away.”It has to be built for edge cases, not just demos.
“A lot of tech companies lose sight of the fact that not everyone in this country has a reliable Wi-Fi connection,” Marilyn says. “Even if you’re in a city, it doesn’t necessarily persist.”
That’s why Xander went all-in on:
Self-contained glasses (no phone required)
On-device speech processing (no internet required)
No storage of conversation data
The bar is simple:
“If you’re depending on this to communicate, it just has to work.”
The Xander team won a CES Innovation award in 2024 and 2025 (Honoree for Aging & Accessibility) and the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP brought them to showcase.
Built by Listening: What Hundreds of Users Taught Them
From the start, Marilyn and Alex built Xander by listening closely, REALLY closely.
“We did a lot of testing with hundreds of people,” Marilyn says. “We watched people. It’s not just asking questions, you want to observe their behavior and how they interact.”
Those sessions revealed the real-world constraints that shaped the product. However, between technical insights came moments that hit much harder:
A husband in an ER who could finally follow doctors’ instructions.
A veteran who described life before Xander as “fading to black.”
A young man whose mother feared for his mental health until captions brought him back into the world.
Those are the moments that anchor the team through the grind.
James Rush, center, said he would “fade to black” before Xander. He’s worn the glasses for 2 years.
A Tiny Team Taking Big Swings in the Triangle
The Xander team is small but mighty and consists of six people working from home. They are committed to solving the deeper problems, not just checking boxes.
“If our company didn’t exist and this product never reached the people who need it,” Alex says, “that would be very, very sad. This way of building it, private, reliable, built for them, has to exist.”
Until recently, Xander was being run out of a small third-floor apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. Their “lab” was the back of the living room. Their test rig for new glasses was a ring of frames listening to NPR and podcasts for 12 hours at a time.
14 pairs of glasses listening to a podcast to learn
Scaling from that setup wasn’t realistic. When they started looking for a move, they had a checklist:
More space they could actually afford, ideally to keep working from home
Proximity to strong healthcare and tech ecosystems, like they had in Boston
Access to universities and co-op talent
A startup community they could plug into, even if they didn’t have time to attend every event
They considered places like Providence and, on paper, cities like Baltimore and California tech hubs. But RTP kept popping up for all the right reasons: healthcare, universities, and an emerging tech and med-tech ecosystem that felt familiar but more livable.
On their first visit to the neighborhood they’re in now, they basically fell in love on sight and decided to buy a house almost immediately.
“We made a really snap, rush decision,” Marilyn admits. “We did not have to move as quickly as we did. But the first time we came here, we decided we were going to buy. It was a bit irrational.”
It’s working out well. The Triangle has given them the space, physically and professionally, to grow.
“I don’t know that we would have been able to scale as quickly as we have without moving here,” Alex says.
What’s Next for Xander
The first generation of Xander glasses has been in market for about two years. Sales are growing at a pace that feels sustainable for them, and the next chapter is all about scale and evolution:
Finishing and launching their next-gen, dual-mic, dual-display glasses
Reducing dependency on third-party hardware by designing and building more of the glasses themselves
Expanding use cases beyond individuals into museums, planetariums, and other public venues where current captioning options are clunky or unusable
Continuing to raise capital to support this deeper, more ambitious hardware push
They already have working prototypes and a patent on the new audio system. Now it’s about getting from prototype to product, without sacrificing the privacy, reliability, and dignity that got them this far.
“You know, we’re building it in a different way, and we’ve seen the actual human impact,” Alex explained. “If this product didn’t exist, that would be very, very sad for people who really could have benefited. So I just feel like we have to exist. It just has to work.”
Robbie Allen tries on a pair at the 2025 Q4 Tweener Night
If you’d like to connect with Xander for pilots, partnerships, or introductions to others working on accessibility in the Triangle, find Marilyn and Alex on LinkedIn and make sure to check out their website: https://www.xanderglasses.com
Explore more Tweener portfolio companies at tweenerfund.com.
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