Hemispheric is focused on a persistent gap in medicine: the lack of objective and quantitative tests for the brain. The company says conditions including depression, PTSD, Parkinson’s and early cognitive decline are still commonly assessed through questionnaires and behavioral observation, leaving patients and clinicians to work through trial-and-error approaches to treatment.
The company’s core product is Descartes, a frontier NeuroAI model trained to decode non-invasive brain activity. Hemispheric says the model translates the brain’s electrical signals into measurable information that could help clinicians and researchers detect disease earlier, identify subtypes of disorders and guide treatment decisions.
“Every major organ in the body has objective tests, except the brain,” said Lalazar, co-founder and CEO of Hemispheric. “Each person's brain is unique, like a snowflake, which is why current attempts at one-size-fits-all treatments fall short. We are working toward a future where you walk into your primary care office, get a brain test as routine as a blood draw, and leave with information you and your clinician can actually use to improve your health.”
Hemispheric’s system uses a lightweight dry EEG headset and a phone or tablet app. A patient wears the headset for 15 minutes while interacting with the app, allowing the system to capture brain activity and generate results that clinicians can use as part of diagnosis, treatment selection and monitoring.
“Non-invasive neurotechnology is the only path to democratizing brain health,” said Littwin, Hemispheric’s co-founder and CTO. “The challenge has always been variability: the same brain signal can look completely different across individuals. At a very large scale, it becomes something you can model, making it possible to measure brain function accurately and use it in real-world settings without surgery.”
Descartes was trained on more than 250,000 hours of multimodal, EEG and behavioral recordings from more than 100,000 participants, according to the company. The additional article said volunteers across Asia, Tel Aviv and Boston completed game-like tasks while EEG hardware recorded brain activity.
Building the platform took more than six years of research, engineering and data collection. Hemispheric said it has built its own data collection labs and model-training infrastructure for neural data, along with a 112-person team spanning neuroscience, medical systems and large-scale AI.
The company’s first applications are aimed at precision brain health, including PTSD, mTBI, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s. The additional article said Hemispheric plans to submit its first product, a PTSD diagnostic, to the FDA in early 2027, with a public rollout targeted for later that year.
Hemispheric said it has demonstrated the platform to leadership at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health and is pursuing a broad regulatory strategy. The company is also working with government and pharmaceutical partners, with initial market efforts focused on the US and Europe.
The new funding will support broader deployment of Descartes with government, healthcare and pharma partners, expansion of Hemispheric’s global brain data network, regulatory work for precision diagnostics and growth of its US team.
“Hemispheric is doing for the brain what genomics did for cancer: turning something historically unmeasurable into data that can be modeled, understood, and acted on,” said Garen Staglin, founder of One Mind and general partner at Awareness Capital. “This has the promise to be foundational infrastructure for the next era of medicine, and the implications for healthcare, research, and human performance are unlike anything we have seen in a generation.”
Hemispheric’s bet is that a large proprietary brain-activity dataset, paired with dedicated hardware and AI models, can make brain diagnostics more measurable. The challenge is whether those models can clear regulatory review and perform reliably across the range of patients clinicians see in real-world settings.
This analysis is based on a Business Wire press release republished by Yahoo Finance.
Image courtesy of David Garb.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
