The virtual neurology clinic that turned a six-month wait into a seven-day video visit.
Above: the company's Series A calling card. A neurology clinic that lives in an app, photographed mid-victory-lap.
Who Neura Health is, right now, before the origin story.
It is a weeknight, and somewhere a person with a migraine that has lasted three days opens an app instead of a glovebox full of expired prescriptions. They message a care team that answers. Within a week, they are on video with a board-certified neurologist who has read their history and built them a plan. No waiting room. No clipboard. No six-month purgatory between the headache and the help. That is Neura Health in 2026: a virtual neurology clinic that behaves less like a hospital wing and more like a service that actually wants to hear from you.
The company sits at the intersection of three things American healthcare rarely combines: a real doctor, real speed, and a real plan for the days between appointments. Roughly 56 people run it out of New York. More than 43,000 patients have passed through it. And the conditions it handles are the ones that scare people most when they cannot get an answer - migraine and headache, epilepsy, sleep disorders, concussion, stroke recovery, tremor, long COVID, and memory loss.
The shortage nobody schedules around.
Here is the inconvenient arithmetic. About 145 million Americans live with a neurological condition. The number of neurologists is not growing to match, and the ones who exist are concentrated in cities and academic centers. The result is a wait that runs four to six months for a first appointment - assuming you can find one taking new patients at all. For a migraine, that is a season of your life. For a stroke survivor or someone watching a parent lose their memory, it is worse.
The usual response to a doctor shortage is to tell patients to be patient. Neura Health found that advice charming and useless. Waiting is not a treatment. It is just where conditions get worse and emergency rooms fill up with problems that a fifteen-minute conversation could have caught months earlier.
The origin story, kept short on purpose.
Elizabeth Burstein did not set out to disrupt neurology. She set out to find a neurologist. Early in the pandemic she developed a deeply trapped nerve that caused chronic pain for more than two years. She lived in New York City, a place that is supposed to have everything, and still waited six months for an appointment. She had also spent her career building exactly the kind of product that could fix this - Head of Product at Maven Clinic, Director of Product at Zocdoc, with dual Stanford degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy. She knew the machinery. She had just never been the patient stuck inside it.
Her co-founder, Sameer Madan, brought a matching scar. In his early twenties he needed a discectomy and flew back to India for the MRI and treatment because the whole trip - flight included - cost less than care at Stanford. Two founders, two personal stories about how absurd neurological care can be, and one shared conclusion: the system was not short on expertise, it was short on access.
Ex-Maven Clinic, ex-Zocdoc product leader. Stanford CS & Philosophy. Became the patient, then built the fix.
Once flew to India for a cheaper MRI. Now helps run a clinic designed so nobody has to.
A doctor, a coach, and a plan that does not vanish after the visit.
Most telehealth ends when the video call does. Neura's wager is that for chronic neurological conditions, the visit is the easy part - it is the weeks afterward, the titrations and the bad nights and the "is this normal?" questions, where care usually falls apart. So the membership is built around continuity, not a single appointment.
Board-certified neurologists and sub-specialists, usually within about a week.
Twice-monthly 30-minute sessions plus unlimited 24/7 in-app chat with your care team.
Evidence-based, AAN best-practice treatment plans with a custom education curriculum.
iOS and Android symptom tracking, messaging, scheduling, and medication management.
Providers can prescribe and coordinate medication delivery as part of the plan.
Headache/migraine, epilepsy, sleep, concussion, stroke, tremor, long COVID, memory.
How a personal frustration turned into a national network.
Elizabeth Burstein and Sameer Madan start building the clinic they each wished they'd had as patients.
Early funding to improve access and quality of care for neurologic conditions, starting with headache and migraine.
New financing to expand go-to-market toward employers and health plans, not just direct-to-consumer members.
Led by the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women Venture Fund - its first-ever investment - to fund national expansion.
In-network with 40+ health plans and partnered with systems like Sentara Health.
Skeptical is the correct setting. Here is the data anyway.
Access is a nice story; outcomes are the argument. Neura reports that its treatment model cut emergency room and urgent care visits by 73% among its patients and produced a 66% increase in patients' global impression of improvement - the clinical way of saying people felt meaningfully better. Those are the two numbers that matter to a health plan deciding whether faster access is also cheaper care.
Figures self-reported by Neura Health. Bars are scaled for the eye, not the medical record.
The business model follows the proof. Members can pay out of pocket - a first week for $1, then roughly $29-39 a month - or use insurance, since Neura is in-network with more than 40 plans including Aetna, Cigna, Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California, and Medicare. On top of that sit contracts with health systems and employers, plus referral partnerships with life-sciences companies. The Series A even drew the American Heart Association's venture fund off the bench for its very first investment.
Access and quality, treated as the same problem.
Neura's stated mission is to improve both access to and quality of care for those 145 million Americans by building the first national network of tele-neurologists, paired with technology that personalizes the plan. The two halves matter together. Fast care that is mediocre is just a quicker disappointment. Excellent care nobody can reach is a brochure. The whole point is refusing to choose between them.
The shortage is not getting smaller. The need is not going away.
Aging populations, more long-COVID neurological symptoms, and a neurologist pipeline that cannot scale fast enough all point the same direction: demand for brain care is rising and supply is not. A virtual clinic that can reach a patient in any zip code, follow them between visits, and prove it lowers expensive emergencies is not a pandemic novelty. It is infrastructure. The Series A capital is aimed squarely at turning a working model into a national one.
So return to that weeknight. The person with the three-day migraine. In the old version, they wait until spring, then the ER, then a referral, then maybe an answer. In Neura's version, they open an app, get a neurologist by next week, and have a coach who answers at 2 a.m. The headache is the same. Everything around it is different. That is the whole company - not a cure for the brain, but a cure for the wait.