Neural Galaxy (also operating as Galaxy Brain Scientific) is a Beijing-based brain science company building a precision, non-invasive neuromodulation platform. Its proprietary personalized Brain Functional Sectors (pBFS) technology maps over 200 functional regions of an individual brain, then guides targeted transcranial magnetic stimulation with millimeter accuracy. Founded in 2019 by Harvard and MIT neuroscientists with serial entrepreneur Coach Wei, the company is running clinical and registration trials across depression, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, autism and aphasia, and has raised roughly $93M to date.
Terran Biosciences is a platform biotech developing therapeutics and technologies for neurological and psychiatric disease. It runs one of the industry's largest psychedelic development programs - psilocybin, LSD, MDMA derivatives and novel prodrugs - alongside late-stage schizophrenia assets licensed from Sanofi and Pierre Fabre, GMP psychedelic manufacturing, and NM-101, an FDA-cleared cloud platform for neuromelanin MRI analysis.
Leal Therapeutics is a Worcester, Massachusetts biotech founded in 2021 by repeat CNS entrepreneur Asa Abeliovich, the scientist behind Prevail Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lilly). Leal builds first-in-class neuro-metabolic medicines on a single idea: many brain diseases share a broken metabolism, and correcting those imbalances can treat conditions from schizophrenia to ALS. Backed by roughly $114M in total funding, its pipeline includes LTX-001, a brain-penetrant oral glutaminase inhibitor in the clinic, and LTX-002, an antisense oligonucleotide for ALS.
Ron Cohen, M.D., is a biotech entrepreneur with a 30-year record of building companies that ship medicines for the nervous system. He founded Acorda Therapeutics in 1995 from his apartment and grew it into a public company that brought multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's therapies to market. After Acorda's sale to Merz in 2024, he evaluated roughly two dozen startups before taking the CEO seat at Oryon Cell Therapies in March 2026, a Belmont, Massachusetts company developing autologous neuron replacement therapy for Parkinson's. He is a past Chair of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO).
Shilpa Sambashivan is the CEO and a co-founder of Nura Bio, a South San Francisco biotech building brain-penetrant small molecules that aim to stop nerves from dying. A protein biochemist by training, she helped spin the company out of academic labs in 2018, built its R&D engine as Chief Scientific Officer, and was elevated to CEO in September 2024 alongside a $68M Series A extension that pushed total funding past $140M. Her lead drug, NB-4746, blocks the SARM1 enzyme that triggers axon self-destruction.
Will Nitze is the founder and CEO of IQBAR, a brain-and-body nutrition brand he built from a Kickstarter campaign into a nine-figure CPG company selling plant-based protein bars, hydration mixes, and instant coffee in more than 10,000 retail doors. A Harvard psychology and neuroscience graduate who once sold software to oil-and-gas companies, he formulated his first products with no food-science background, scaled IQBAR past 100 million bars sold, and now hosts the founder podcast Eating Glass.
Will Stratton is the Chief Business Officer and Head of Strategy and Planning at Autobahn Therapeutics, a San Diego biotech building brain-targeting small molecules for neuropsychiatric and neuroimmunologic disorders. A Yale chemist turned Wharton-trained dealmaker, he helped steer the company's oversubscribed $100 million Series C in 2024 and runs the corporate strategy behind a pipeline led by ABX-002, a thyroid hormone receptor beta agonist for depression.
Asa Abeliovich is a physician-scientist turned serial biotech founder who spent two decades at the lab bench at Columbia before deciding the only way to get his ideas into patients was to start companies. He co-founded Alector, founded and sold Prevail Therapeutics to Eli Lilly for about $1 billion, and now runs Leal Therapeutics, a Worcester startup chasing a contrarian idea: that fixing the brain's broken metabolism can treat everything from schizophrenia to ALS to Alzheimer's. Leal spent over two years in stealth before surfacing with a clinical-stage pipeline and roughly $114 million raised.
Jacob Donoghue is a physician-scientist and the co-founder and CEO of Beacon Biosignals, a Boston company applying machine learning to EEG brain data to build neurobiomarkers for psychiatric, neurological, and sleep disorders. Trained with an MD from Harvard Medical School and a PhD in neuroscience from MIT, he started Beacon in 2019 on the bet that decades of overlooked brainwave recordings could be turned into a precision-medicine engine for drug development and diagnosis. Under his leadership the company has raised over $116M, secured FDA clearance for a wearable EEG headband, acquired home sleep-testing firm CleveMed, and partnered with more than half of the world's top ten biopharma companies.
Scott Xiao is the co-founder and CEO of Luminopia, a Boston-area digital therapeutics company whose lead product turns watching cartoons in a VR headset into an FDA-approved treatment for amblyopia, the leading cause of vision loss in children. He left Harvard with classmate Dean Travers to build the first VR-based therapeutic ever cleared by the FDA, partnering with Sesame Workshop, Nickelodeon, and DreamWorks for content and with Boston Children's Hospital and MIT for the science.
Andrew Huberman is a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine and the host of the Huberman Lab podcast - regularly ranked the #1 health and science podcast in the world with over 400 episodes. His Stanford lab investigates visual system repair, neural plasticity, and stress resilience, publishing in Nature, Science, and Cell. A former skateboarder who once wrote for Thrasher magazine and lobbied the Palo Alto city council to build a skate park at age 13, Huberman translates complex neuroscience into actionable protocols for millions of listeners globally.
Mel Robbins is a bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and one of the most-booked motivational speakers in the world. The creator of the 5 Second Rule and The Let Them Theory, she turned a near-bankruptcy crisis at 41 into a media empire with 40 million followers, a top-3 global podcast, and books translated into 65 languages. As CEO of 143 Studios, she produces content for corporate partners including Starbucks, JPMorgan Chase, and LinkedIn.
Celine Halioua is the founder and CEO of Loyal, a San Francisco biotech company developing the first FDA-approved drug for lifespan extension - starting with dogs. Born in Austin, Texas to a Moroccan mother and German father, she studied neuroscience at UT Austin and nanotechnology at Uppsala University before pursuing a DPhil at Oxford on the health economics of gene therapy. She left Oxford to join Laura Deming's Longevity Fund as Chief of Staff, then founded Loyal in 2019 at age 24. With $250M+ in total funding and the largest clinical trial ever conducted in animal health (1,300+ dogs across 70+ clinics), Loyal's lead drug LOY-002 has cleared FDA safety and efficacy hurdles - putting it on track to become the first longevity drug ever approved for any species.
Kaushik Arakalgud is a technology entrepreneur and builder based in Bengaluru, India, currently working in AI at Domestika - the global creative learning platform that reached unicorn status with a $1.3B valuation in 2022. As Co-Founder and CTO of Aimwiser, an AI and neuroscience-powered people and wellness intelligence SaaS platform, he brings together his passion for education technology, artificial intelligence, and human development. Trained as a computer science engineer at PES College of Engineering, Kaushik has spent his career at the intersection of technology and meaningful societal impact.
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.
MEandMine is a Silicon Valley startup that uses AI and neuroscience-backed games to surface the silent struggles of K-12 students. Its platform delivers ten minutes a day of personalized, gamified skill-building, while an AI engine flags psychological risk by analyzing 160+ in-game behaviors, giving teachers and counselors real-time signals for early intervention.
J. Seth Strattan, PhD is a General Partner at Two Bear Capital, a Whitefish, Montana-based venture capital firm investing at the crossroads of life sciences and technology. With a PhD in Structural Biology and a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University, Strattan spent years at Stanford building and leading the engineering and data science teams behind landmark genomics consortia - ENCODE, the Human Cell Atlas, and the International Human Epigenomics Consortium - before pivoting to back the founders tackling biology's hardest problems. He is based in Silicon Valley, leads Two Bear Capital's Menlo Park office, and splits his remaining time between Montana and a family farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky.
Tim Paris is the co-founder and CEO of Dataro, an AI-native fundraising intelligence platform helping nonprofits predict donor behavior and optimize campaigns. A former cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD from Western Sydney University, Tim pivoted from brain research to social impact by applying statistical machine learning to charitable fundraising. He co-founded Dataro in 2017 alongside high school friend David Lyndon (CTO) and later Chris Paver (COO). The company has grown to serve 300+ organizations worldwide - including World Central Kitchen, Amnesty International, and Stand Up To Cancer - and raised a $14.28M Series A led by Blueprint Equity in February 2026, bringing total funding to $16.78M.
Dee Datta, Ph.D., is co-founder and CEO of Switch Therapeutics, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company pioneering conditionally activated siRNA (CASi) molecules to treat neurodegenerative diseases and other conditions with significant unmet need. With a PhD from Caltech, an MBA from Stanford, and a career spanning venture capital at The Column Group and Longitude Capital, corporate development at Forty Seven Inc., and the C-suite at XOMA, Datta brings rare scientific depth and dealmaking fluency to one of the most ambitious RNA medicine platforms in the field. Switch raised a $52 million Series A in March 2023 and in late 2024 named its first development candidate - CASi-APOE, a brain-targeted, liver-sparing RNAi therapy aimed at the 60% of Alzheimer's patients who carry the APOE4 gene variant.
Eric Green is the Founder and CEO of Trace Neuroscience, a South San Francisco biotech company racing to develop the first effective ASO therapy for ALS. A Harvard-and-Stanford-trained physician-scientist with a background in cardiology, Green co-founded iLab Solutions (acquired by Agilent), Respira Design (Stanford $50K Challenge winner), and Maze Therapeutics before launching Trace with a $101 million Series A in November 2024. Trace's lead program targets UNC13A - a protein lost in ALS patients - using an antisense oligonucleotide designed to restore healthy nerve-muscle communication. With clinical trials targeting early 2026, Green is betting human genetics can do for ALS what it did for heart failure.
Robert Yang (Guangyu Robert Yang) is a computational neuroscientist turned AI founder who left a tenure-track professorship at MIT to build Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera), a company creating socially intelligent AI agents. Trained in physics at Peking University, with a PhD from NYU and postdoc at Columbia, Yang became a 2022 Searle Scholar before pivoting to the startup world in December 2023. His company made waves running 1,000 autonomous AI agents in Minecraft — watching them spontaneously develop religions, trade economies, and social hierarchies — and has since raised over $45M to bring that vision into enterprise productivity tools and beyond.
Will Yin is the co-founder and CEO of Mandolin, a San Francisco AI automation company building autonomous agents for specialty drug access. A Greenwich High School valedictorian and Stanford dropout, Yin previously co-founded Jupiter (YC-backed, $9M raised) before pivoting to healthcare. At Mandolin, he and co-founder Rohit Rustagi have raised $97M to automate the back-office workflows — prior auth, benefits verification, billing — that delay cancer and Alzheimer's patients from getting life-saving specialty therapies. Within months of launch, Mandolin deployed across 700+ clinics serving 250,000+ new patients annually.
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.
Elinor (Wen-Hsin) Huang is the Founder and CEO of MEandMine, a San Jose-based AI-powered mental health platform for K-12 students that uses gamified, neuroscience-backed tools to help children build emotional regulation skills before crises emerge. Motivated by the loss of an MIT classmate to suicide and the 11-year average gap between symptom onset and treatment, she built MEandMine into a certified B Corp with partnerships spanning Google, Stanford Medicine, and the NYC Department of Education, and raised $6.6M in venture funding including a $4.5M round in June 2024.
Gorish Aggarwal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sybill AI, an agentic AI platform that automates the administrative grind of B2B sales - generating call summaries, drafting follow-up emails, and syncing CRM data so sales reps can focus on closing deals. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who once worked on AI to restore sight to the blind, Gorish pivoted from computational neuroscience to sales intelligence after noticing during a 2020 Zoom lecture that reading human engagement over video was nearly impossible. He and three Stanford roommates - including his sister Mehak Aggarwal - built Sybill, scaling it from $100K to $1M ARR in nine months and raising $14.5M total, with an oversubscribed $11M Series A led by Greycroft in July 2024.
Nico Laqua is the 26-year-old co-founder and CEO/CTO of Corgi, the AI-native full-stack insurance carrier that went from zero to unicorn ($1.3B valuation) in under two years. A Columbia neuroscience Rabi Scholar turned serial founder, he built Basket Entertainment into a gaming publisher with 200M+ monthly active users before pivoting to reinvent commercial insurance for startups. Corgi raised $268M total - including a $160M Series B in May 2026 - and became the first AI-native licensed insurance carrier purpose-built for technology companies.
Samuel Rodriques is a physicist-turned-bioengineer and co-founder and CEO of Edison Scientific, the AI-driven scientific discovery company behind Kosmos - an AI scientist that reportedly condenses six months of PhD-level research into a single day. A MIT PhD and Hertz Fellow who invented implosion fabrication and pioneered spatial transcriptomics, Rodriques left the Francis Crick Institute to co-found FutureHouse (funded by Eric Schmidt) in 2023, then spun it into for-profit Edison Scientific, which raised a $70M seed round at a $250M valuation in December 2025. Named to Time 100 AI in 2025, he is on a mission to cure all diseases by mid-century through AI-accelerated science.
Emily Bennett is an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads investing for a16z speedrun - the firm's high-velocity startup accelerator that has deployed over $180M to 150+ startups since 2023. A neuroscience graduate of Middlebury College (magna cum laude) turned Harvard MBA, she carved a winding path through product roles at Spotify, The New York Times, and Facebook before pivoting fully into venture at Owl Ventures, where she rose to Partner with a focus on edtech. At a16z, her investment thesis centers on AI-native tools that allow single founders to operate what once required entire teams, and she is a vocal advocate for the first AI-native university - an institution where learning paths, schedules, and research adapt in real time through continuous data feedback loops.
Ari Morcos is the Co-Founder and CEO of DatologyAI, a Redwood City-based startup that automates the curation of training data for AI models. A Harvard-trained neuroscientist who spent two years at DeepMind and five at Meta AI Research (FAIR), Morcos pivoted from studying how biological brains learn to solving how artificial ones should eat - coining the phrase 'models are what they eat.' His company has raised $57.65M across seed and Series A rounds backed by Felicis Ventures, Radical Ventures, and angel investors including Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Jeff Dean. With an h-index of 35 and over 12,000 citations, Morcos bridges rigorous ML research and venture-scale ambition, targeting the data layer as AI's most underinvested frontier.
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.