One of the minds behind Apple’s Face ID wants to point AI at something harder than a face. He wants it to read the brain.
His startup, Hemispheric, has come out of stealth with $52M. The Tel Aviv firm calls itself a NeuroAI company, and its pitch is simple. It wants a brain test to be as routine as a blood draw.
The founders are an unusual pair. Hagai Lalazar, a computational neuroscientist, is chief executive. Gidi Littwin, who co-founded RealFace and helped invent Face ID, is chief technology officer. He later worked on the AI behind Apple’s Vision Pro.
Reading the brain without surgery #
Their model is called Descartes. It has 6 billion parameters, and it was trained on 250,000 hours of brain recordings from more than 100,000 people. Hemispheric says that is one of the largest datasets of its kind.
The test is light. A patient wears a dry EEG headset for 15 minutes and taps through tasks on a phone, WIRED reported. Descartes then turns the brain’s electrical signals into hard numbers a doctor can use.
The targets are conditions that resist objective measurement. Hemispheric points to depression, PTSD, mild brain injury, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s. Most are still judged today by questionnaires and interviews.
A different bet from Neuralink #
It is a pointed contrast with the field’s loudest name. Elon Musk’s Neuralink drills implants into the skull. Hemispheric, like China’s BrainCo, is betting brain tech will be something you wear, not something surgeons install.
The round drew a long list of backers. They include Hanaco Ventures, Protocol Labs, L Catterton, and Behance founder Scott Belsky.
AI moves deeper into medicine #
The raise fits a rush of money into AI health. Neko Health just raised $700M to scan bodies, Chai Discovery pulled in $400M for AI drug design, and an OpenAI researcher left to build a $2bn drug startup.
Hemispheric has already shown Descartes to the FDA, and it wants to launch in the US and Europe. The caution is the same across the field. Medical AI has already stumbled in hospitals, and a model that guides brain diagnoses will face hard questions. For now, the company has the money, the pedigree, and a very big claim.
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