Building Whole Brain Interfaces for Everyday Life
Announcing our $100M Series A Led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks
About half of all people will experience a neurological or psychiatric disorder in their lifetime.1 While we've made significant advances in treating infectious diseases, cancer, and cardiovascular conditions, progress in brain health has lagged far behind.
These disorders, like addiction, chronic pain, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and Alzheimer's, are some of the greatest harms to human wellbeing. And they're often rooted in deep-brain structures that have been historically difficult to reach without surgery.
We have a lot to learn about the brain — the field of neuroscience is relatively young. But we also know a lot about what needs to be done and where to start. What we still lack is a safe, precise, and scalable way to reach the deep brain.
Meanwhile, nearly one billion people globally currently suffer from a mental or substance-use disorder.2 Chronic pain affects 1 in 5 adults worldwide,3 and costs the US alone up to $635B annually.4 Neurological diseases are now the leading cause of lost healthy years of life, surpassing even cardiovascular disease.5
Pharmaceuticals help some. Invasive neurosurgery has brought life-changing relief to a few. But for most people, there's a gap between what's possible and what medicine can deliver today, a gap that has swallowed decades of productive life.
Now is the time to solve it.
What we're doing about it
At Nudge, we're building the best technology for interfacing with the brain to improve people's lives — safely, precisely, and without surgery.
Our first platform is based on non-invasive focused ultrasound, which allows us to stimulate and image the brain with millimeter precision. Three months ago, we built and tested Nudge Zero, our first human-ready system (read more here). Today, we are using the device on people nearly every day in research studies to develop and improve our platform. Soon, we'll begin helping patients who can benefit from this technology.
By vertically integrating hardware, software, and neuroscience, we're building an end-to-end brain interface platform that's scalable, adaptive, and grounded in real human need.
Achieving this requires solving some of the most difficult technical challenges in the world. Delivering high-resolution ultrasound through the skull is not like sending sound through air or soft tissue — the skull acts as a highly distorting lens. The acoustic properties of bone vary from person to person, and even small errors in targeting or ultrasound parameters can make the difference between meaningful engagement of a brain circuit and none at all.
In parallel, we also need to develop the hardware and algorithms for ultrasound-based structural and functional imaging through the skull, create methods to optimize sonication parameters for each individual from neural and physiological readouts, and build a consumer-grade product that "just works". Doing this well requires deep advances in physics modeling, signal processing, hardware design, and real-time feedback systems, alongside an ever-evolving map of how the brain is organized, how it responds, and how it can be guided.
This will not be easy. We've assembled a team of the best, who believe hard things are worth doing. Bringing together domain experts, world-class engineers and researchers in one place working toward that shared goal is what makes such an ambitious mission possible.
To help us achieve these goals at a scale and pace that has not been done before, we raised a $100M Series A led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks.
The future we're building
Imagine a future where chronic pain can be relieved without opioids, where a patient with PTSD can regulate traumatic recall in real time, where clinicians can image and modulate brain circuits as easily as checking a patient's heart rate. Imagine a future where focus can be enhanced without caffeine, where learning a new language or skill takes days or weeks, rather than months or years.
This future isn't science fiction, it's an engineering roadmap. And we're building it now.
Join us
We are hiring across software, ML, hardware, neuroscience, embedded systems, clinical operations, talent, and people ops roles, and more. If you're driven by hard problems that matter, come build the future with us.