Hemispheric Emerges from Stealth with $52M in Funding to Launch Descartes, the First Frontier NeuroAI Model for Decoding the Human Brain

• 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
• 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

TEL AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Hemispheric, the NeuroAI company building a foundational platform to measure and understand the human brain, emerged today from stealth with $52 million in early-stage funding. The funding comes from leading investors, including Hanaco Ventures, OneMind/Awareness Capital, Protocol Labs, L Catterton, Arkin Capital, Howard Morgan, Naomi Azrieli, Yasmin Lukatz, Scott Belsky, and more. The company was co-founded by Hagai Lalazar, PhD, a computational neuroscientist, and Gidi Littwin, co-founder of RealFace (acquired by Apple), and co-inventor of FaceID.

Hemispheric is shedding light on the greatest remaining blind spot in medicine: the brain. Unlike the heart or lungs, which have had diagnostic tools for decades, the brain still has no objective and quantitative tests. Conditions like depression, PTSD, Parkinson’s, and early signs of cognitive decline are still diagnosed through subjective questionnaires and behavioral observation. As a result, neuropsychiatric disorders affecting roughly one in three people globally cost more than an estimated $5.3 trillion annually, and leave patients using trial and error in a struggle to find a solution that improves their health.

The engine at the core of Hemispheric’s platform is Descartes, 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. 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.

"Every major organ in the body has objective tests, except the brain," said Hagai Lalazar, PhD, 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."

Using the platform requires no surgery or lengthy protocols. A patient wears a lightweight dry EEG headset for 15 minutes while interacting with an app on a tablet or phone. The system captures brain activity and generates objective results that clinicians can use as a tool for diagnosis, selecting the most effective intervention that matches that patient’s unique brain profile, and monitor improvements measurably.

"Non-invasive neurotechnology is the only path to democratizing brain health," said Gidi Littwin, co-founder and CTO of Hemispheric. "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 the world's largest and growing proprietary dataset of brain activity: more than 250,000 hours of multimodal, EEG, and behavioral recordings from over 100,000 participants, collected through Hemispheric's global research network.

Creating Descartes required more than six years of research, software and hardware engineering, and data collection operations. Hemispheric has built proprietary data collection labs and model training infrastructure designed specifically for neural data, and has assembled a 112-person interdisciplinary team spanning neuroscience, clinical-grade medical systems, and large-scale AI, supported by advisors across psychiatry, neurology, and neuroscience.

"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."

The first applications of Descartes target precision brain health, beginning with conditions including PTSD, mTBI, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s. Hemispheric demonstrated the platform and its applications to the leadership of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, and is pursuing a broad regulatory strategy. Hemispheric is working with government and pharma partners to scale this technology to bring real-world impact for patients, starting with the US and European markets.

This new funding will be used to expand deployment of the Descartes platform with government, healthcare, and pharma partners, grow its global brain data network, advance regulatory pathways for precision diagnostics, and scale its U.S. team.

To learn more about Hemispheric and the Descartes platform, visit www.hemispheric.ai.

About Hemispheric

Hemispheric is a NeuroAI company building a foundational AI platform to decode the human brain accurately. Its frontier model, Descartes, is trained on a large-scale EEG dataset and translates brain activity into actionable understanding, powering applications across healthcare, life sciences, and monitoring. The company 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). Hemispheric has spent more than six years building the world’s largest proprietary brain-activity dataset, and has scaled its AI models, resulting in breakthrough performance. It operates globally across the United States, Israel, and Asia. Learn more at hemispheric.ai.