Short answer: Ramses Alcaide says a family member needing prosthetics inspired him at eight, leading to a neuroscience PhD at the University of Michigan. Seeing Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diagnosed ten years in, Neurable spent about ten years in R&D, backed partly by the US Army.
Watch this answer from Episode 41 (starts at 10:31) · Episode 41 notes and transcript
From Episode 41: This Headset Reads Your Brain in Real Time. We Demo It Live., starting at 10:31.
Jordan Metzner [10:31]: That's incredible. Can you give us a little history of how you got into this, and how you even found this field and opportunity, and study of all of this, how you guys got your product to where it's at today?
Ramses Alcaide [10:43]: Yeah, I mean, it's been a lifelong journey. I got passionate about brain computer interfaces when I was about eight. Right? I had a family member get into a tragic accident, unfortunately, where he ended up needing prosthetics. And so I wanted to build prosthetics that could be controlled by the brain. And then that made me focus my life toward electrical engineering. I got a PhD in neuroscience, and that's really where the first version of this Neurable technology got built in grad school at the University of Michigan. But what's really key there is I also saw something that that completely just rocked my world. Right? And in a bad way, which is like and you both might know this just through the breadth of audiences they've spoken to, but the standard of care for knowing they have, like, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's is is, like, ten years into the disease. Like, that's crazy. Right? And so what if we could bring this incredible technology that's in the lab to at scale devices like headphones and earbuds? We could do neuroscience earlier, we can identify problems sooner, we could take action. Right?
Ramses Alcaide [11:43]: And so that became the mission of the company. And our goal was not to be the first company to release headphones with brain sensors or earbuds with brain sensors. It was to make sure that the performance was high enough that it would actually deliver on the promise of brain computer interfaces. So we spent about ten years in research and development, building out the technology backed by, great investors, the US Army, and working across numerous partnerships. And now fast forward all that time later, we started working with consumer brands to bring this technology to everyday devices.
