Samphire Neuroscience is a London-based neurotechnology company building drug-free, hormone-free wearables for women's health. Its flagship product, Nettle, is a headband that uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to gently modulate the brain regions tied to mood and pain, worn 20 minutes a day in the run-up to menstruation. Marketed as the first EU-cleared (CE-certified) neuromodulation device for women's health, Nettle targets PMS, PMDD, menstrual pain and related hormonal conditions. Founded in 2021 by neuroscientist Emilė Radytė and IP lawyer Alex Cook, the company has raised roughly $7.77M across pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds.
Emilė Radytė is a Harvard- and Oxford-trained neuroscientist and the co-founder and CEO of Samphire Neuroscience, a London-based neurotech company building drug-free, hormone-free wearable devices for menstrual health. Her flagship product, Nettle, is a head-worn device using non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to target the neurological drivers of menstrual pain and mood symptoms. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list in 2024, she came up through emergency medicine at Harvard and a PhD in psychiatry and engineering at Oxford, and reframes conditions like PMS and PMDD as questions of brain circuitry rather than hormones alone.
Don Vaughn, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ampa Health, a Palo Alto-based neurotechnology company building FDA-cleared portable TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) devices that compress 36 days of depression treatment into a single day. A Stanford-educated physicist turned UCLA neuroscientist, Vaughn has built a career at the intersection of brain science, machine learning, and accessibility - detoured, notably, through a DJ career that landed him a #28 iTunes Dance chart hit featuring Nick Lachey. His TEDx talk on neurohacking has surpassed one million views. Ampa raised an oversubscribed $8.5M pre-A round in October 2025, achieved FDA clearance for its Ampa One device in February 2025, and is targeting 5,000 patient remissions by end of 2026 - with a long-term audacious goal of a billion remissions in ten years.