The pitch for Muse has always been faintly implausible: put on a headband, and you will hear your own mind. Focus, and the app plays calm weather. Let your attention drift, and it starts to storm. This is neurofeedback, and the useful thing about it is that you cannot lie to it.
Muse is the flagship product of Interaxon Inc., a company incorporated in Toronto in 2007 by a psychotherapist (Ariel Garten), an engineer (Chris Aimone), and a designer (Trevor Coleman). Before it was a company, it was an art project - installations and concerts, around 2003, where audiences changed the lights and the music using nothing but their brain activity. The founders reportedly once helped light up the CN Tower and Niagara Falls this way. Which is a charming origin story, and also a fairly literal demonstration of the entire business: turn invisible electrical activity into something you can see and hear.
The consumer headband arrived in May 2014. The trick was compression - not of files, but of instruments. Electroencephalography (EEG) normally means gel, wires, and a technician. Muse turned it into four dry sensors, a Bluetooth link, and an app that translates the signal into audio. It sold the idea that meditation, a practice famous for being hard to know if you are doing right, could come with a readout.
Then it kept adding sensors. Muse 2 (2018) folded in heart rate, breath, and movement. Muse S (2020) went soft and sleep-friendly, so you could wear it overnight. And in March 2025, Muse S Athena became the first consumer wearable to combine clinical-grade EEG with fNIRS - light sensors that read blood oxygen in your prefrontal cortex - plus SpO2. The distinction matters more than it sounds. EEG can tell you that you are focusing. fNIRS can tell you how hard your brain is working to do it. That gap, between "am I" and "how much," is roughly where the company now wants to live.
The commercial story is the one every hardware company eventually confronts: you cannot sell someone a headband twice. So in 2022 Interaxon raised a $9.5M Series C and pointed it squarely at a subscription. Sell the device once; sell the membership forever. Premium unlocks guided content, sleep tools, an AI coach named Enso, smart wakeup, and - the genuinely novel bit - features that track how your brain changes over months, not minutes.
"Muse has collected and decoded over 1 billion minutes of brain data - one of the largest EEG collections in the world."
- On the Foundational Brain Model, Interaxon's "LLM for the brain"
All of which leads to the most interesting number in the whole dossier. Interaxon says it has collected and decoded more than a billion minutes of brainwaves. It is using that to build what it calls a Foundational Brain Model - explicitly framed as a large language model, but trained to decode the brain instead of language. Whether or not that model helps you sleep tonight, a model trained on that much neural data is the kind of asset that tends to become the actual company.
The subtle tell is in the web address. The store is choosemuse.com; the newer front door is musehealth.ai. A meditation gadget is turning into a brain-health instrument. In 2025 the company said its AI platform delivers clinical-grade sleep and brain intelligence, and independent work (Lanthier et al., 2025, in SLEEP Advances) put its sleep staging at 88-96% agreement with polysomnography - the gold-standard lab test. By mid-2026, Muse's at-home sleep EEG was being wired into Cumulus Neuroscience's platform for central-nervous-system clinical trials, debuting at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in London. The wellness gadget, in other words, is applying for a serious job.
