neuromodulation
(11)
Joanna Stanicka
Joanna Stanicka is the co-founder, president and CEO of Axonis Therapeutics, a Boston clinical-stage biotech developing first-in-class oral medicines that target the brain chloride transporter KCC2 to treat epilepsy, neuropathic pain and spinal cord injury. A Harvard-trained neuroscientist who began her career in cancer biology in Ireland, she moved from the bench to the boardroom, taking Axonis from a Boston Children's Hospital discovery to a company that raised a $115 million Series A in 2024 and pushed its lead drug, AXN-027, into first-in-human trials.
Michael Onuscheck
Michael Onuscheck is CEO and Chairman of Presidio Medical, a San Mateo clinical-stage neuromodulation company developing an ultra-low-frequency waveform platform aimed at chronic pain. He joined in September 2021 after two years on the board, returning to neuromodulation after leading Alcon's global businesses and, earlier, Boston Scientific's Neuromodulation division.
Scott Kokones
Scott Kokones is co-founder and CEO of Enspire DBS Therapy, a Cleveland Clinic portfolio company building an implantable deep brain stimulation system paired with physical rehab to restore arm function in stroke survivors. He is running the RESTORE pivotal trial after the EDEN proof-of-concept study, having raised $27.9M total including a $17.6M Series B in 2023 and a $10.3M Series B1 in January 2026. Alongside Enspire he is a general partner at Guide Medical Ventures and a co-founder of Qr8 Health and CardioSolv Ablation Technologies. His earlier career runs through Intelect Medical, Boston Scientific, Enpath Medical, and Medtronic.
Zoar Engelman
Zoar Engelman is the co-founder and CEO of Axon Therapies, a clinical-stage medical device company chasing a stubborn problem: heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, a condition that has resisted nearly every drug thrown at it. A biomedical engineer with a PhD from the University of Auckland, Engelman spent two decades turning lab ideas into implantable and catheter-based devices, co-founding roughly nine ventures and helping raise more than $150 million along the way. In September 2025 he stepped up from Chief Scientific Officer to CEO as Axon closed an oversubscribed $32 million Series A to advance SAVM, an implant-free procedure that quiets an overactive sympathetic nervous system to rebalance the body's blood volume.
Anuj Bhardwaj
Anuj Bhardwaj is the co-founder and CEO of SecondWave Systems, a Minneapolis-St. Paul medical device company building the SecondWave MINI, a wearable, noninvasive ultrasound device that aims to calm chronic inflammation by aiming focused sound at the spleen. He took a family-owned industrial ultrasound business founded by his parents in 1977 and redirected its core technology toward medicine, raising a $7M Series A in 2025 on top of more than $15M in government research funding from DARPA, NIH, and ARPA-H. Trained as a mechanical engineer at Penn State with an MS and MBA from MIT, he sits at the crossroads of hardware, bioelectronic medicine, and the emerging field of bio-ultrasonic therapy.
Coach Wei
Coach Wei is a serial technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Neural Galaxy, a brain-science company spun out of Harvard Medical School and MIT that maps the individual human brain and delivers personalized neuromodulation therapy for brain disorders. A Tsinghua University electrical engineer with an MS from MIT, he began building software at EMC before founding three venture-backed startups over two decades: Nexaweb (pioneering Rich Internet Applications), Yottaa (web performance and cloud), and now Neural Galaxy, which has raised roughly $100M including a $75M Series A. He holds six patents and was named to Boston's 40 Under 40.
Meredith Perry
Meredith Perry is the co-founder and CEO of Elemind, a neurotech company building a wearable headband that reads your brainwaves in real time and nudges them with bursts of sound, marketed as sleep on demand. Before Elemind she was the inventor behind uBeam, the ultrasonic wireless-charging venture she dreamed up as a University of Pennsylvania undergrad and grew into a roughly $40 million, much-debated startup backed by Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Cuban and Marissa Mayer. A trained paleobiologist and astrobiologist who once did research with NASA, Perry holds dozens of patents and now wants to build what she calls an app store for the brain.
MJ Antonini
MJ Antonini is the co-founder and CEO of NeuroBionics, an MIT spinout building hair-thin, flexible bioelectronic fibers that thread through blood vessels to reach deep neural structures - delivering deep brain stimulation without opening the skull. A Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology graduate who trained in both medicine and engineering, he turned a decade of fiber research from Polina Anikeeva's MIT lab into a venture-backed company that raised an oversubscribed $10M seed round to push toward first-in-human trials.
Raphael Certain
Raphael Certain is the founder and CEO of Clarity, a Franco-American neurotechnology company building a wearable virtual-reality headset that delivers personalized light and sound stimulation at gamma frequencies to support the aging brain. A self-taught entrepreneur who pivoted from marine biology to neurophysiology, he turned a master's thesis at the Neurodegenerative Diseases Institute in Bordeaux into a venture-backed company. By 24 he had raised more than $1.3 million, assembled an international team of 20-plus people across Paris and San Francisco, and built partnerships with leading universities in the US and UK.
Emilė Radytė
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.
Rami Elghandour
Rami Elghandour is Chairman and CEO of Arcellx (NASDAQ: ACLX), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation cell therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases. An engineer turned venture capitalist turned serial CEO, he has led two successful IPOs, built two multibillion-dollar public companies, and raised over $1.75 billion in capital. At Arcellx, he transformed the company from an early-stage startup into a commercial-ready organization with a peak valuation exceeding $6 billion, advancing the anito-cel BCMA CAR-T therapy toward FDA approval for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. A TEDx speaker on unconscious bias and gender equity, Rami is also an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' and the Sundance-premiered 'American Doctor.'