The retina is the only piece of your brain a doctor can photograph without a scalpel. JuneBrain built a wearable, AI-powered scanner to make that photograph routine.
Here is a fact that sounds like it should be more famous than it is: the retina is central nervous system tissue. When an ophthalmologist looks into the back of your eye, they are looking at an outcropping of your brain, exposed and photographable in a way no other neural tissue is. This is not a metaphor. It is anatomy. And it is the entire premise of JuneBrain.
JuneBrain, founded in Baltimore in 2017, builds optical coherence tomography devices - OCT, the imaging technique that captures cross-sections of the retina at near-cellular resolution - and pairs them with AI software that reads those images. The pitch is straightforward once you accept the anatomy: if the eye is a window to the brain, then a good enough eye scan is a way to monitor neurological disease. Multiple sclerosis thins particular retinal layers. So, researchers increasingly believe, do Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Watch the layers, and you may be watching the disease.
The catch, historically, is that OCT lived in eye clinics. The machines were large, expensive, and required a trained technician to operate. A neurologist who wanted retinal data on an MS patient had to send that patient down the hall, or across town, to ophthalmology - which mostly meant it did not happen. JuneBrain's flagship product, the Neuro-i SS-OCT, is an attempt to dissolve that friction. It is designed to be wearable, non-invasive, and - this is the load-bearing word - technician-free.
That last part is easy to under-appreciate. Plenty of companies make better optics. JuneBrain's more interesting bet is about workflow: that the reason retinal imaging stays locked in eye clinics is not the physics but the staffing. Remove the technician, and suddenly the scan can happen in a neurology office, a primary-care visit, an underserved rural clinic, or eventually a living room. The device gets the picture; the software does the reading.
Most medical-device startups begin with a founder who noticed a customer's problem. JuneBrain began with a founder who was the problem. In 2017, Samantha Scott - a neuroscientist with a PhD and a background spanning neuroscience and artificial intelligence - was diagnosed with a neuromuscular disorder. She then ran into the gap that anyone with a chronic neurological condition knows well: her neurologist could see her a handful of times a year, and the disease did not keep that schedule.
Between visits, there was mostly silence. No good way to know whether a treatment was working, whether things were stable, whether a change was starting. That silence is the space JuneBrain was built to fill. The company's stated mission - to expand the reach of neurology and ophthalmology into underserved communities - reads less like a slogan and more like a description of the founder's own frustration, generalized.
Founder & CEO. Neuroscience and AI background; studied at Stanford. Started JuneBrain in 2017 after her own diagnosis exposed how little monitoring happens between clinic visits.
Alongside COO Ali Valdes and a ~15-person team of engineers, clinicians, and AI researchers.
A wearable, non-invasive, AI-powered swept-source OCT device. It captures high-resolution retinal images without a technician, so the scan can move out of the eye clinic and into neurology, primary care, and remote settings. Working prototypes have been built and tested.
The software half of the system. It performs automated multi-layer retinal segmentation and turns raw scans into quantitative biomarkers - numbers clinicians and researchers can track over time to gauge disease progression and treatment response.
The two pieces are meant to grow up together. Hardware that is easy to deploy generates more scans; more scans train better algorithms; better algorithms make the reports more useful; more useful reports justify more deployment. It is the kind of data flywheel that is easy to draw and hard to build - which is roughly what the patents, the clinical studies, and the grant funding are for.
The near-term customers are the people who already care about retinal layers: neurologists monitoring MS, clinical researchers running trials, and pharma sponsors who need objective, quantitative endpoints instead of subjective ones. The company reports nearly 100 patients enrolled across three of its own clinical studies, four issued patents, and a roughly $6 million qualified sales pipeline - all pointed at an FDA submission targeted for 2026.
It is, in other words, a pre-commercial hardware company doing the unglamorous, capital-intensive work that medtech actually requires: prototypes, patients, regulators, and patience. The interesting milestones here are not viral - they are the kind that determine whether a device is ever allowed to touch a patient at all.
“OCT products and AI software to support disease research and remote monitoring of neurological conditions.”
| Source | Type | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| National Science Foundation | SBIR / STTR grants | ~$3.0M | Phase I & II, incl. a $1M award |
| Private investors | Equity (cumulative) | ~$3.4M | TEDCO, Springboard & others |
| ETC Baltimore | Series Seed+ (Feb 2026) | $200K | Co-investment toward FDA / launch |
| New Orleans BioFund & Gulf South Angels | Equity | n/a | Via BioChallenge 2025 win |
The blend is telling. Roughly half of JuneBrain's fuel has been non-dilutive grant money - the sort of funding that hardware startups chase precisely because building a regulated medical device takes years and burns cash long before revenue arrives. Grants buy time. Time is the scarce resource in medtech.
Samantha Scott starts JuneBrain in the wake of her own neuromuscular diagnosis and the monitoring gap it revealed.
NSF SBIR/STTR awards fund R&D; the team builds and tests working Neuro-i prototypes and enrolls ~100 patients across three studies.
Named a winner of the New Orleans BioInnovation Center's BioChallenge 2025; investment from New Orleans BioFund and Gulf South Angels follows.
Emerging Technology Centers announces a $200K investment in the Series Seed+ round, accelerating the path toward FDA clearance.
Four patents issued, a ~$6M pipeline, and a targeted FDA submission - the gate between prototype and product.
Clinical and research collaboration on retinal imaging and neurological disease.
Research partner; JuneBrain is based at the University of Maryland BioPark in Baltimore.
Research collaboration supporting the science behind the platform.
Competitive neighborhood: legacy OCT makers (Zeiss, Heidelberg, Topcon) and retinal-AI / home-OCT players. JuneBrain's wedge is the wearable, technician-free form factor aimed squarely at neurology.
The retina is the only part of the central nervous system a doctor can image directly and non-invasively - which is why an eye scan can double as a brain check.
Scott didn't spot a market gap from the outside; she fell into it. The company is her answer to her own diagnosis.
The Neuro-i is built to run without a trained OCT operator - the exact staffing constraint that keeps imaging trapped in eye clinics.
Headquartered at the University of Maryland BioPark, part of a growing Mid-Atlantic medtech cluster - not the usual coastal suspects.