Dan Furman is a neuroscientist and the co-founder and CEO of Arctop, a company building the software intelligence layer that decodes human brain signals in real time from everyday wearables like headbands, earbuds and VR headsets. A Harvard-trained neurobiologist with a Technion PhD, he once helped adapt a sleep-monitoring device into a brain-computer interface for Stephen Hawking, and his doctoral work showed that non-invasive scalp sensors could control individual neuroprosthetic fingers. In 2023 Arctop raised a $10M Series A to apply its 'Brain ID' and real-time cognition technology across medicine, education, cybersecurity and entertainment.
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.
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.
Axoft is a Cambridge, Massachusetts neurotechnology company building implantable brain-computer interfaces (iBCIs) out of Fleuron, a proprietary material it claims is up to 10,000x softer than the polyimide used in conventional brain implants. By making electronics roughly as soft as brain tissue, Axoft aims to keep thousands of sensors in stable contact with single neurons for years instead of months - reducing scarring and signal loss - to diagnose and eventually treat disorders of consciousness, paralysis, and other neurological conditions. A Harvard spinout founded in 2021, it raised an oversubscribed $55M Series A in April 2026 and has run first-in-human studies in 11+ patients worldwide.
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.
Bryan Johnson is an American tech entrepreneur who built and sold Braintree (the parent of Venmo) to PayPal for $800 million, then funneled the proceeds into venture firm OS Fund and neurotech startup Kernel. He is now best known for Blueprint, a personal protocol and commercial brand built around his 'Don't Die' philosophy, chronicled in the 2025 Netflix documentary 'Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.'
Mike Carusi is a General Partner at Lightstone Ventures, a leading life sciences venture capital firm based in Portola Valley, California, with $847 million in assets under management. With a career spanning over three decades in healthcare investing, Carusi has built a reputation as one of the most active early-stage investors in biotech and medical devices, appearing on the Forbes Midas List for top technology and life science investors. He co-founded Lightstone Ventures in 2014 after years at Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV), and has overseen landmark exits including Plexxikon (acquired by Daiichi Sankyo for ~$1 billion), Ardian (acquired by Medtronic for $800 million), Ra Medical Systems (acquired by UCB for $2.3 billion), and dozens more. He teaches healthcare venture capital at Dartmouth Tuck and is a faculty member of the Stanford Biodesign Emerging Entrepreneurs Forum.
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.
Fred Ehrsam (Frederick Ernest Ehrsam III) is a serial founder and investor who co-founded Coinbase in 2012 — the crypto exchange that went public on Nasdaq in 2021 — and Paradigm in 2018, the research-driven crypto VC firm that raised a $2.5 billion fund. Now he's chasing his next frontier: Nudge, a non-invasive brain-computer interface startup using focused ultrasound to modulate brain states, which raised $100 million in Series A funding in 2025. A Duke computer science graduate turned Goldman Sachs FX trader, Ehrsam discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and never looked back — quietly becoming one of the most influential architects of the crypto industry while building a reputation as a deep thinker obsessed with pushing the boundaries of human capability.