A Face ID pioneer’s NeuroAI startup raises $52M
Hemispheric, a NeuroAI startup co-founded by a Face ID pioneer, has raised $52M for Descartes, a model that reads the brain from a 15-minute headset scan.
July 16, 2026 – 1:26 pm
Image by: Hemispheric
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.
Founders and Expertise
The founders are an unusual pair:
- Hagai Lalazar, a computational neuroscientist, is the CEO.
- Gidi Littwin, who co-founded RealFace and helped invent Face ID, is the CTO. He later worked on the AI behind Apple’s Vision Pro.
Descartes: Reading the Brain
Their model is called Descartes. It has 6 billion parameters and was trained on 250,000 hours of brain recordings from more than 100,000 people—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.
Targeting Mental Health Conditions
Hemispheric targets conditions that resist objective measurement, including:
- Depression
- PTSD
- Mild brain injury
- Schizophrenia
- Alzheimer’s
Most of these are still judged today by questionnaires and interviews.
A Different Approach from Neuralink
This is a pointed contrast with the field’s loudest name, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which drills implants into the skull. Hemispheric, like China’s BrainCo, is betting brain tech will be something you wear, not something surgeons install.
Investors and Funding
The round drew a long list of backers, including Hanaco Ventures, Protocol Labs, L Catterton, and Behance founder Scott Belsky.
AI in 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 wants to launch in the US and Europe. However, the field faces hard questions; medical AI has stumbled in hospitals before.
For now, Hemispheric has the money, the pedigree, and a very big claim.