Arctop is a cognition company building software that decodes the human brain. Its AI platform translates electrical brain-activity signals from everyday wearables - headbands, earbuds, and VR/AR headsets - into real-time, actionable insight about focus, emotion, intention, and memory. Founded in 2016 by neuroscientist Dan Furman and engineer Eitan Kay, Arctop licenses its non-invasive brain-decoding software to developers and enterprises across health, entertainment, education, and government, positioning itself as the intelligence layer between brain-sensing hardware and the applications that use it.
Beacon Biosignals is a Boston-based neurotechnology company that pairs FDA-cleared wearable EEG hardware with AI to turn brain electrical activity - especially during sleep - into scalable, at-home neurodiagnostics. Its platform powers drug development, clinical trials, and precision medicine across neurology, psychiatry, and sleep medicine.
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.
Paul Le Floch is the co-founder and CEO of Axoft, a Cambridge neurotechnology company building brain implants out of a material so soft it behaves like brain tissue. A Harvard-trained materials scientist and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he bet that the way to read the brain better was not to borrow chips from the semiconductor industry but to invent a new material from scratch. The result, Fleuron, is up to thousands of times softer than conventional probes yet can carry over 1,000 sensors. Axoft has now implanted its device in 11 patients and raised a $55M Series A to push toward FDA trials.
Cayden Pierce is the CEO and co-founder of Mentra, a San Francisco startup building MentraOS - the open-source operating system for AI smart glasses. Described as 'the Android for smart glasses,' MentraOS lets developers write one app and deploy it across any pair of smart glasses. A self-described transhumanist hacker, Pierce built his first DIY smart glasses prototype in his dorm room, worked with smart glasses inventor Steve Mann at the University of Toronto, researched proactive AI wearable agents at MIT Media Lab under Pattie Maes, converted a 40-year-old RV into a mobile hacker lab, and dropped out of MIT in 2024 to launch Mentra. The company raised an $8 million seed round backed by the co-founders of Android, YouTube, and Pebble, plus Y Combinator, Amazon, and Toyota Ventures.
Juan Benet (born Juan Batiz-Benet) is a Mexican-American computer scientist, founder and CEO of Protocol Labs, and the inventor of IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and Filecoin. A Stanford-trained distributed systems engineer, he left Yahoo's orbit after a startup acquisition to build open-source protocols that challenge the foundational architecture of the web. His Filecoin ICO raised $257 million in 2017, and the network now holds over 15 EiB of decentralized storage. In 2026 he launched a podcast exploring neurotech and human intelligence augmentation - a signal that the architect of decentralized storage is now thinking about upgrading the human mind itself.