Hemispheric, an Israeli NeuroAI startup developing a foundation AI model for measuring and interpreting human brain activity, has emerged from stealth after more than six years of research with $52 million in funding.
The investment round was co-led by investors including Hanaco Ventures, OneMind/Awareness Capital, Protocol Labs, L Catterton, Arkin Capital, Howard Morgan, Naomi Azrieli, Yasmin Lukatz, and Scott Belsky.
Hemispheric was founded by computational neuroscientist Hagai Lalazar, PhD, and AI entrepreneur Gidi Littwin, who previously co-founded RealFace (acquired by Apple and integrated into FaceID).
Hagai Lalazar, co-founder and CEO of Hemispheric, commenting on the fundraise, said: “Every major organ in the body has objective tests, except the brain. 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 has spent more than six years building its foundational AI model Descartes. Descartes is the world’s first frontier NeuroAI model trained to decode non-invasive brain activity and translate it into actionable insights that clinicians and researchers can act on.
- Descartes is a 6-billion-parameter NeuroAI foundation model that decodes brain activity with breakthrough accuracy.
- Trained on Hemispheric’s proprietary multimodal, EEG, and behavioral dataset: 250,000 hours of data from more than 100,000 participants.
- Delivers actionable understanding to improve brain health, starting with PTSD, mTBI, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease, to extend human mental health span by decades.
- Descartes was developed by a team of experts in computational neuroscience, deep learning, and FDA-cleared medical imaging who worked on the core technology of FaceID and Apple Vision Pro.
Similar to how large language models capture the semantic meaning of text or vision models of images, Descartes translates the brain’s electrical language into a quantitative and objective understanding of brain function. These insights can detect disease earlier, distinguish between disorder subtypes, and guide treatment selection in clinical and life sciences settings.