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The company Hemispheric, which has raised $52 million, combines its AI model with a 15-minute noninvasive scan that it hopes will help diagnose ailments like depression, PTSD and Parkinson's
After working more than six years under the radar, the startup Hemispheric announced Wednesday that it has raised $52 million in three rounds as it builds an artificial intelligence model that deciphers the activity of the brain.
Hemispheric is led by CEO Hagai Lalazar, a brain researcher and serial developer, and Chief Technology Officer Gidi Littwin, an AI researcher and a founder of RealFace, an AI software company bought by Apple in 2017. Littwin is a co-holder of a patent for the key component used by Apple's Face ID facial recognition system.
Littwin and Lalazar met seven years ago when Littwin was about to leave the U.S. tech giant. Hemispheric now employs 112 people in brain science, artificial intelligence, software engineering, electronics and medical systems.
"The brain is the most important organ in the body and the one that causes the most morbidity, but the only way to diagnose the brain's health is to ask you how you're feeling, with no technological solution that can decipher the brain's signals through noninvasive sensors," Lalazar says.
His and Littwin's biggest problem was the paucity of data for feeding such an AI model, so Hemispheric set up labs in Israel, the United States and the Philippines starting in 2019.
There, volunteers have their brain activity recorded for 15 minutes, after they don a light helmet to take an electroencephalogram, an EEG, the brain's version of an electrocardiogram. Hemispheric now has more than 250,000 hours of EEG data from over 100,000 participants.
