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neuroscience based startups

04 September 2015

I wanted to see what kind of neuroscience based startups are being worked on these days. I looked at all the companies on angel list ( a fundraising platforms for startups) that were tagged as neuroscience. Angel list has about ~600,000 companies and 106 of them are tagged under neuroscience. I looked at all the neuroscience tagged companies. Out of that list of 106, there were 12 that seemed interesting. It looks like to me angel list is not a good place for finding neuroscience based startups. A lot of neuroscience companies in the list are dead, I’d say about 30%.

Here are the companies that seemed interesting: https://angel.co/senselabs - hardware to improve brain functioning, interested to see if it works https://angel.co/branching-minds - applied cognitive science to learning software https://angel.co/mint-labs - brain imaging in the cloud, are people using this? https://angel.co/personal-neuro - looks like they pivoted, but looks interesting https://angel.co/re-compose - I would do this software on an iwatch https://angel.co/backyard-brains - teach kids about neuroscience with hardware! https://angel.co/halo-neuroscience-1 - hardware! https://angel.co/synetiq - marketing tools https://angel.co/neuroclick-1 marketing tools https://angel.co/cognitive-algorithms-laboratory - mad scientist? https://angel.co/efficio-s-r-o - cloud storage for EEG data, they should build a database around this data https://angel.co/neuroinitiative - simulations? https://angel.co/about-my-brain-institute - performance at work https://angel.co/neurontools - hardware and marketing

Here is a thread on quora that lists some other interesting neuroscience based startups: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-interesting-psychology-neuroscience-startups

I know there are a lot more neuroscience based companies out there. The Boston area has a lot of brain and science based companies because of the concentration of colleges: http://eyewire.org https://naralogics.com/ https://www.neumitra.com In my research I came across a neuroscience based accelerator: http://neurolaunch.com/

I was expecting to see a lot more neuroscience based companies. A lot of the companies that are under the neuroscience category on angel list are not really neuroscience companies. They use machine learning techniques to extract some data or use concepts from cognitive science to train you to be smarter. This was more of an exploratory search for me. I want to understand how the intersection of neuroscience and profit looks like. I was looking for companies that had the potential to open up neuroscience to more people and accelerate our learnings of the brain.