For years, diagnosing depression, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's has relied on subjective questionnaires and behavioral observations. Now, a startup founded by a veteran of Apple's FaceID team aims to bring objective, AI-driven diagnostics to cognitive health.
The Co-Founders and the Data
Gidi Littwin, co-inventor of Apple's FaceID and contributor to the Vision Pro hand-tracking system, left Apple in 2020 after helping collect what he told WIRED were "hundreds of thousands of subjects' worth of data" to train deep learning models. He then joined Hemispheric cofounder Hagai Lalazar, who had cold-messaged him on LinkedIn and interviewed about 75 candidates before finding Littwin.
Hemispheric's "most prized possession," according to Littwin, is a dataset of 250,000 hours of brain data from 100,000 paid volunteers across Asia, Tel Aviv, and Boston. Subjects performed game-like activities designed to activate different brain regions. This data trained a frontier AI model that infers brain function from electrical activity within the skull—similar to how large language models deduce meaning from text.
The Product and Regulatory Path
The team tested their generalized model on people diagnosed with PTSD, schizophrenia, and depression, stating it made accurate deductions about brain health. They are currently conducting a clinical study to test whether the model can diagnose and even predict Alzheimer's.
The first product, designed to study PTSD, will be submitted to the U.S. FDA for approval early next year, with hopes of public rollout later in 2027. A patient would wear a lightweight EEG headset for about 15 minutes while interacting with a tablet app. Hemispheric says its AI then helps clinicians decode signals to diagnose, predict treatment effectiveness, and monitor progress.
“The future that we envision is one where this is akin to a blood test,” Lalazar told WIRED. “The device is going to be very, very cheap; it will be able to be sold and distributed throughout mental health clinics, hospitals, and even psychologists’ offices.”
Funding and Competitive Landscape
Hemispheric has raised $52 million in early-stage funding from American and Israeli venture capital firms and individual investors, including early Uber backer Howard Morgan. The funds will support partnerships with governments, healthcare organizations, and pharmaceutical firms, hiring in the U.S., and regulatory work. The company also plans to collect brain data from millions more people to improve its model.
AI-assisted diagnostic tools for conditions like lung cancer are already in clinical use in Europe. Meanwhile, AI giants including OpenAI and Anthropic are expanding into healthcare, intensifying competition for startups like Hemispheric.
Broader Implications for Enterprise AI
The approach Hemispheric uses—collecting massive, diverse datasets and training a frontier model to generate insights from physiological signals—mirrors methods being adopted in other complex domains such as supply chain optimization and trade finance. While the immediate application is medical, the underlying technique of personalized prediction from sparse sensor data could inform future logistics AI platforms that monitor equipment health or predict delivery delays. Enterprise technology leaders should watch how the model generalizes across populations, a challenge directly relevant to any AI deployment at scale.
| Key Metric | Detail |
|---|---|
| Funding Raised | $52 million |
| Brain Data Collected | 250,000 hours from 100,000 volunteers |
| Data Sources | Asia, Tel Aviv, Boston |
| First Product | PTSD diagnostic tool |
| FDA Submission Target | Early 2027 |
| Public Availability Target | Later 2027 |
| Lead Investors | Howard Morgan (early Uber backer), American and Israeli VCs |
