Hemispheric raises $52M to build AI brain scans for mental health

In short: Hemispheric raised $52 million to develop an AI system that reads brainwave tests and helps doctors diagnose and track conditions like PTSD and depression.

What happened

Hemispheric is a startup founded by Gidi Littwin, who helped build Apple’s FaceID, and his cofounder Hagai Lalazar. The company says it has spent about six years building an AI model to interpret electrical activity in the brain.

To train its system, Hemispheric collected around 250,000 hours of brain data from 100,000 paid volunteers. Participants were in locations including parts of Asia, Tel Aviv, and Boston. They did short tasks that looked like games, designed to activate different parts of the brain.

The company’s approach uses an EEG headset, which is a lightweight cap that measures tiny electrical signals from the scalp (like a heart monitor, but for brain activity). A patient wears it for about 15 minutes while using an app on a tablet. Hemispheric says its AI helps clinicians make sense of those signals, including for PTSD, schizophrenia, and depression.

Hemispheric plans to submit its first product, aimed at PTSD research and clinical use, to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) early next year. The company hopes to make it publicly available later in 2027. It also says it may build its own brain scanners, arguing that today’s EEG devices were not designed with modern AI training in mind.

Why it matters

Many brain and mental health conditions are still diagnosed mainly through interviews, questionnaires, and observing behavior. If tools like this work well in clinical studies and get FDA approval, they could give doctors an extra, more consistent data point, more like a lab test than a conversation.

Source: Wired