She named her company after Tennessee fireflies. Now JuneBrain is building a wearable eye scanner that reads the one piece of your brain you can see from the outside.
Most people think of an eye exam as a thing that happens once a year, in a dim room, with a stranger asking you to read the smallest line. Samantha Scott looked at that same room and saw a bottleneck. The retina is the only part of the central nervous system you can photograph without cutting anyone open. So why was the equipment that captures it locked inside specialty clinics, bolted to a table, run by a technician?
That question is the entire premise of JuneBrain, the Baltimore company she founded in 2017 and still runs as CEO. The flagship device, the Neuro-i SS-OCT, is a high-resolution optical coherence tomography scanner shrunk into something closer to a VR headset than a clinic console. No technician. No appointment three months out. The idea is to put diagnostic-grade retinal imaging into pharmacies, neurology offices, community health centers, mobile clinics, eventually homes - anywhere a person needs to be watched more often than once a year.
Pair that hardware with AI trained to read the layers of the retina, and you get a way to detect and monitor neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration remotely. Conditions like multiple sclerosis and macular degeneration leave fingerprints in the retinal layers long before a patient notices a change. Scott's bet is that catching those fingerprints early, and often, changes the math of care.
She is not a marketer who hired engineers. She is the engineer. A PhD in biomedical engineering from USC, an undergraduate degree from Stanford, a detour through Oxford to study computational neuroscience. Twelve years building biomedical devices and studying how the brain and the retina actually work before she ever wrote a pitch deck.
I've always been a nerd.- Samantha Scott
A wearable, technician-free scanner captures high-resolution retinal images using swept-source OCT - the kind of imaging that used to need a clinic console.
Deep-learning software performs multi-layer segmentation, measuring the retinal layers automatically and turning a scan into structured data.
Because the device can travel to the patient, clinicians track change between visits instead of guessing once a year - earlier signals, individualized care.
If you have a disability or need some level of accessibility, that's just not an issue for us.- Samantha Scott, on how she runs JuneBrain
For the June bugs of her Tennessee high-school hometown, and for the month the company launched - which happens to be Brain Awareness Month.
For the organ Scott says she loves most. Put them together and you get a name no committee would have approved - which is exactly the point.
Founders love to lead with the impressive general: the market size, the disruption, the inevitability. Scott leads with a firefly. The company name is a tell - it comes from a real place, a real childhood, a real affection for the thing she studies.
The origin is just as specific. The seed was a suggestion from her husband: use that biomedical engineering background to find a way to monitor health from home rather than waiting on the calendar. The question that followed - what if monitoring a neurological condition could be as easy as putting on a headset? - became a company.
Ask her what she wanted to be as a kid and the answer is gloriously un-strategic: a garbage truck operator, because she was fascinated by the mechanical movement, or a pediatrician, because she wanted to help people immediately. Look at JuneBrain and you can see both kids in the room. The one who loves machines that move, and the one who wants the help to arrive right now.
When she raised money, some investors advised her to keep personal details quiet, arguing it would undercut her standing as a CEO. She declined, and turned the advice into a filter: a partner who needs her to be less herself is the wrong partner. The pitch and the person are the same thing.
It is hard because when running a startup, it is very important to separate who you are from your company.
It gave it a very human perspective, and I think that's part of why it was so important to me to do translational work.
Being named the BioChallenge winner is a milestone for JuneBrain and a springboard for what comes next.
I've always been a nerd.
Bars are illustrative, scaled for comparison.
Engineers, software developers, neurologists and ophthalmologists under one roof.
Built at the UM BioPark and The LaunchPort - a deliberate bet on the city's medtech cluster.
2025 NOBIC BioChallenge - and the crowd favorite award, too.
Working prototype in hand and a regulatory submission in its sights.
JuneBrain blends Tennessee fireflies with the brain. Try getting that past a branding agency.
The company launched in June - which is, fittingly, Brain Awareness Month.
The retina is the one slice of your central nervous system visible from outside the body. That's why an eye scanner can hint at brain health.
She studied computational neuroscience at Oxford through a Stanford study-abroad program before her USC PhD.
She calls herself a "supercharged nerd magnet" - her shorthand for the talent she pulls into the room.
Garbage truck operator. She loved the mechanics. Plan B was pediatrician. The startup is both.