Co-Founder & CEO · Arctop
Dan Furman
He builds software that listens to the brain in real time and hands you back what it hears: focus, stress, attention, identity. No drilling required.
Reading the room, and everyone in it
He builds software that listens to the brain in real time and hands you back what it hears: focus, stress, attention, identity. No drilling required.
Reading the room, and everyone in it
Most of neurotech is obsessed with the hardware: the headset, the electrode, the implant. Dan Furman bet on the part nobody could see. Arctop, the company he co-founded in 2016 with software engineer Eitan Kay, makes the intelligence layer that sits between a brain-sensing device and the app on top of it - software that turns raw electrical noise from a headband or a pair of earbuds into a live read on whether you are locked in, stressed, bored, or confused.
His argument is contrarian and simple. The bottleneck in reading the brain was never just capturing the signal. It was decoding it well enough, fast enough, and personally enough to matter in the real world. Capturing brain data is loud and crowded. Understanding it is where the work is.
That conviction now runs through medicine, education, cybersecurity, gaming and entertainment - with partners including Stanford Medicine, Surgical Safety Technologies and the Academy for Surgical Coaching, and funding from Wellcome Leap's SAVE program.
"The brain is constantly talking. Arctop built an ear for it."
Dan Furman
He was 16, standing in an operating room in Newport Beach, watching a neurosurgeon work on a patient with Parkinson's. As Dr. Christopher Duma adjusted the electrical stimulation, the patient's tremor worsened, improved, then vanished. A dial, turned by hand, quieting a body. That image did the recruiting.
Harvard came next - a degree in Neurobiology, with a Music minor he never treated as a footnote. Then a San Diego sleep-tech startup, where he took on a problem with a famous name attached: adapting a sleep-monitoring device into a non-invasive communication interface for Stephen Hawking, who wanted an alternative to his cheek-click and had no interest in surgery.
At the Technion's Evoked Potentials Laboratory he earned his PhD and produced the result that still anchors his worldview: proof that non-invasive scalp sensors could control individual neuroprosthetic fingers. The scalp, it turned out, was saying far more than anyone had bothered to decode.
"Even a theoretically perfect implantable system is a non-goal here. What we want is a system that works for everyone."
On why accessibility beats perfection
Software reads focus, stress, memory and emotion from simple electric skin sensors in everyday wearables - headbands, earbuds, VR and AR headsets. The signal is loud; Arctop makes it legible.
A patented system that finds the unique pattern hiding in your cognitive and emotional noise. Your brain becomes a biometric - a password that lives in your head and nowhere else.
From training surgeons faster to a "Duolingo that adjusts to your learning style in real time," Arctop is the layer apps build on. Users explicitly control which developers get to listen.
Furman started performing at age 4. Classically trained pianist. Rock drummer. Guitarist. Dance choreographer. The Music minor at Harvard was not a hobby he tolerated next to the science - it was a second native language, and he credits it for how he runs a company.
His favorite performer is his grandfather, Morry Furman, whom he describes as "the smoothest jazz pianist west of the Mississippi."
"I learned to listen, create beauty with others live, be superfluid across concepts and scales, invent my way from A to B as needed, and to not play with noisy people."
On what music taught him about building a company
A conversation on unlocking the future of brain-computer interfaces - why the hard part was never the headset.
Dan Furman on the future of BCIs