CLOSED 6 BILLION DOLLAR SERIES B DEAL
SAN FRANCISCO - April 05, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Silicon Valley-based Neurotechnology Powerhouse, announced that it launched its non-invasive iBrain™ Personal Brain Monitor, in 4 US states on Friday and sold 1.4% of its stock for more than $85 million, valuing the company at over $6 Billion in the highest Series B financing in History by a margin of $4.5 Billion, at over 12 times Facebook’s Series B valuation. The invitation-only financing itself, with 27 Strategic Investors, including a major Hospital, a leading University, an American Super Angel, 3 elite VCs, 5 pioneering Clinics and 7 top Law Firms, who favored backing scalable non-invasive brain technology over limited and invasive ones, only took 24 minutes to close. “Who needs implants when you have the real deal?” said Dr. Philip Low, PhD, NeuroVigil’s Chairman, Chief Executive and Technology Officer, Founder and Supermajority Owner.
In the first phase of the launch, iBrain, positioned as an investigational device, will hunt for biomarkers of apnea, aneurysms and drug side effects in asymptomatic individuals, as it has in partnership with Roche and Novartis, NeuroVigil’s first paying clients since well over a decade. The investigators will initially not be allowed to modify anyone’s therapy based on iBrain data. That can only happen following FDA-approved tests. In the second phase, NeuroVigil will release the smaller iBrain 3, and will look for signs of Brain Cancer and Parkinson’s, as well as empower individuals who cannot communicate, without drilling a hole in anyone’s head. The project was initiated at the request of late NeuroVigil advisor Stephen Hawking, in case he became locked-in, and its patent – the company favors patents over publicity stunts – is one of NeuroVigil’s 48 granted patents (the company has another 25 immediately pending applications) was fast-tracked by the USPTO. A joint abstract by Dr. Low and Dr. Hawking featuring Dr. Hawking’s brain patterns analyzed by NeuroVigil’s technology was released as early as 2012. The technology was also successfully demonstrated on ALS sufferer Augie Nieto in 2013 who spelled “COMMUNICATE” with his mind.
In parallel, NeuroVigil, which is organized very much like an IP holding company but with a small crew of phenomenal contractors assisting clients, is exploring creating a joint venture with an American, a German and a Japanese car manufacturing conglomerate, to monitor drivers and, in part, to apply Dynamic Spectral Scoring (DSS) and other techniques to revolutionize the management of electric batteries for cars and trucks. An initial meeting with the German conglomerate took place in Stockholm in February.
DSS was initially developed by Dr. Low when he was a graduate student at the Salk Institute on the personal recommendation of Francis Crick, late Nobel Laureate of DNA fame (who had seen Dr. Low’s work at Harvard Medical School when he was a teenager), and was summarized in his one-page PhD thesis. This technology acts like a super-sensitive radar for data by helping identify statistically significant shifts in data, no matter how imperceptible to humans, that can serve to detect in which state a system is and to forecast in which other state the system will transition to, in an unsupervised way, without using an embedded statistical model or training an AI to replicate human performance (and human biases). The technique was applied to a number of systems, and even showed that birds, without a neocortex, had mammalian-like brain patterns, which led to Dr. Low writing the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, the first formal document recognizing consciousness as not restricted to the human brain. “This technology is having tremendous impact” said the late Roger Guillemin, one of 4 Nobel Laureates who helped Dr. Low with NeuroVigil when he was a graduate student, before being full-time at NeuroVigil and Adjunct Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine and Research Affiliate at MIT.
“Our mission is to create a universe where billions of people will be able to non-invasively access, communicate and leverage their brain state in real time,” said Dr. Low. Unlike laborious invasive BCIs which suffer usability issues due to challenges such as the body’s adaptation to the new implant and high cost associated with the scans, iBrain, dubbed as the “iPhone of Neuroscience,” is completely non-invasive, and does not even rely on any animal testing.
In the past two years, NeuroVigil has recruited talent from Amgen, Roche, Novartis and MIT in preparation for the launch. Dr. Low, who has opted to decline stock incentives for himself since 2009 – he initially turned down VCs and government funding and slept in his San Diego office and grew the company organically with less than $5 million in investment over 17 years and holds between 80 and 90% of the stock - and a salary since 2017, has favored donating performance-based stock options to his team, including contractors and interns. He has furthermore created a Manhattan Project for the Brain™, an exclusive alliance of prominent investors and lawyers, trailblazing accelerators and medical personnel, to assist with the launch, and with subsidiaries and partners. The company has put aside an initial tranche of about $40 million in clinical support services to help other companies in the non-invasive biotech space test their technologies.
“NeuroVigil’s bold plan of attack is several quantum leaps above anything else that has ever been envisioned, including by non-neuroscientists. This multidimensional technology has the potential to create a compendium of new industries and to take over the world by storm,” said Dr. Ashraf Elsayegh, MD, FCCP, FAASM, former head of the Divisions of Pulmonary / Critical Care / Intensive Care and Pulmonary Director of the neuromuscular clinic at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world, and Associate Clinical Professor at UCLA School of Medicine. His comments on NeuroVigil are echoed by international venture capitalist and futurist Sven Gabor Janszky, Chairman of 2b AHEAD ThinkTank and 2b AHEAD Ventures GmbH: "Deep Science, excellently applied into different fields. This is the highest ranked company in value and reputation I ever saw at this stage."
Indeed, Dr. Low was recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the Top Young Innovators, an honor shared with the founders of Google and Facebook, and NeuroVigil’s previous valuations were already over twice the Seed and Series A valuations of these companies combined. NeuroVigil was also named as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Health Care and The New York Times identified iBrain as “an innovation that will change your tomorrow.”
