brain-training
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Jesse Pickard
Jesse Pickard is the Founder and CEO of The Mind Company (formerly Elevate Labs), the studio behind Elevate (Apple's App of the Year 2014), Balance (Google's App of the Year 2021), and Spark - a portfolio of science-backed mental fitness apps with over 80 million downloads. A designer-turned-entrepreneur, Pickard co-founded language learning startup MindSnacks in 2010 before pivoting to build Elevate in 2014, pioneering the consumer mental fitness category. He is also an Investing Partner at Volo Ventures.
The Mind Company
The Mind Company is the San Francisco-based mental fitness studio formerly known as Elevate Labs. It makes science-backed mobile apps - Elevate for cognitive training, Balance for personalized meditation, and the new Spark puzzle app - that have together crossed 80 million downloads and collected Apple's and Google's App of the Year honors.
Lumos Labs (Lumosity)
Lumos Labs is the San Francisco company behind Lumosity, the brain-training app that turned cognitive exercises into a daily habit for more than 100 million people. Founded in 2005 by Kunal Sarkar, Michael Scanlon, and David Drescher, Lumosity packages neuropsychology-inspired tasks - memory, attention, processing speed, problem solving, flexibility - into short, gamified workouts. Its database of player performance, the Human Cognition Project, has fueled collaborations with researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, and beyond.
Bob Schafer
Bob Schafer, PhD, is the CEO of Lumos Labs, the company behind Lumosity, the world's largest brain training platform with over 100 million users. A Stanford-trained neuroscientist with postdoctoral work at MIT, Schafer founded Prophecy Sciences (YC W13) before joining Lumos Labs via acquihire in 2015. He rose from Head of Research to Chief Science Officer to President of Lumosity DTx before being named CEO in May 2023. Under his leadership, Lumos Labs achieved FDA 510(k) clearance in December 2025 for LumosityRx (marketed as Prismira), the first prescription digital therapeutic for attention improvement in adults with ADHD — validated by a 500-participant randomized controlled trial.