Neural Galaxy, the Brain Science Company, today announced it has raised $75 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding. The funding will accelerate research and development of its brain disease diagnosis and treatment platform, drive clinical trials of its innovative “POINT” therapy, and grow its global team for solving brain disorders. 3E Bioventures led the round, followed by Lotus Lake Capital, Frees Fund, and Lightspeed China Partners.
Founded in July 2019 by Hesheng Liu, Guoping Feng, Robert Desimone, and Coach Wei, Neural Galaxy’s mission is to solve brain disorders. It is committed to mankind’s last frontier, with a vision of becoming the world’s most impactful company in understanding, protecting, and augmenting brain functions. Previously, Neural Galaxy announced a $6.2M Angel round in September 2019 and a $15.5M Pre-A round in January 2021. With plus rounds and this A round, the startup has raised $100M approximately since its 2019 inception.
“We invest in unmet clinical needs and disruptive innovations. Brain disorders remain to be an urgent challenge as there’s a lack of effective treatment in the world. Neural Galaxy’s interdisciplinary approach resulted in significant scientific breakthroughs and is bringing disruptive innovations to brain health.”, said Dr. Karen Liu, founding partner of lead investor 3E Bioventures. " In just a few months, we have witnessed the company achieving several breakthroughs in clinical practice and steadfast company-wide progress. We believe that Neural Galaxy will be the one to decode the puzzle of brain disorders and take the lead in the brain industry”.
Achieve Breakthroughs in Various Unsolved Brain Disorders with Science
Brain disease accounts for about 11% of all diseases globally, and its social burden approaches 30% of the total economic costs of human diseases. According to the statistics, there are over 130 million patients with various brain disorders in China, including 9.83 million with Alzheimer’s disease, over 2 million kids under 12 years of age with autism (with an annual increase of 200,000), and more than 50 million with depression.
Most brain disorders are caused by functional issues in brain networks. However, the difficulties in detecting functional brain networks and disease-related neural circuits have significantly limited our ability to investigate disease mechanisms and thus result in the lack of effective treatments. Although functional neuroimaging has been widely used in research labs over the past two decades, not having an effective solution to reliably measure functional areas for patient’s brain at the individual level has prevented scientists from bringing research to clinical practice.
Neural Galaxy has successfully solved this neuroscience challenge. It has developed the world’s first and the only “personalized Brain Functional Sectors” technology (pBFS), reliably and accurately mapping over 200 functional parcellations of an individual brain. The scientific breakthrough has been recognized as “a turning point in neuroimaging”. In 2020, Neural Galaxy released the world’s first “Personalized Brain Computing Platform”, enabling doctors to investigate individual-level brain functional issues from observing neural circuits and neural networks clinically for the first time.
With its proprietary system that integrates cognition, brain disorders and brain-computer interaction, Neural Galaxy is driving the implementation of research to clinical practice, developing numerous original technologies for solving brain disorders effectively. Its innovative therapy, POINT therapy, achieved individual-level precise intervention of brain disorder with a non-invasive “brain-computer interaction” approach to read, decode and write brain signals. Neural Galaxy has achieved significant positive treatment outcomes in several major brain diseases such as Depression, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Autism, and Aphasia through clinical trials jointly carried out with several top-tier hospitals.
Prof. Hesheng Liu, co-founder and chief scientist of Neural Galaxy, says that “With the breakthrough research in personalized functional brain networks, we gained a more sophisticated understanding of many brain diseases and have made remarkable progress regarding personalized treatments. Implementing brain science research to clinical applications requires a substantial amount of patient samples and financial support. We are confident to be the first to tackle this global challenge and lead a new era in brain healthcare "
Investors Enthused About an Emerging Trillion-dollar Market Opportunity Enabled by Science
“Brain science has reached a critical development stage, and there is tremendous market opportunity.” Li Feng, Founding Partner of Frees Fund, states that “In 2019, Frees Fund led Neural Galaxy’s first institutional round financing. What caught our attention and convinced us was the top-tier founding team and the science. Since then, Neural Galaxy has made remarkable progress in clinical trials in treating major brain disorders, which surprised us all.”
James Mi, founding partner of Lightspeed China Partners, said, “We continue to back Neural Galaxy because we have faith in its strong R&D capability and its determination to innovate. We believe Neural Galaxy’s non-invasive brain-computer interaction approach is effective and commercially feasible to cure brain disorders and safeguard our brain health.”
“Brain research has been very active in the global market with startups around the world attempting to enter the field.” Said Dr. Hongru Yang, chairman of Lotus Lake Capital. “With its solid research capabilities and technological advancement, we believe Neural Galaxy will be the industry leader and may even help achieve the next milestone of mankind’s history.”
Building a High-performance Team at Scale to Lead the Global Brain Industry
Neural Galaxy’s breakthrough in brain science can be attributed to the cross-discipline background of its founding team. Professor Hesheng Liu started his career as a biomedical engineer at Tsinghua University. CEO Coach Wei double majored in Electrical Engineering and Structural Engineering at Tsinghua University and MIT and has been an innovator and serial entrepreneur in enterprise software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence with over 20 patents. The current Neural Galaxy team is also highly interdisciplinary from diverse backgrounds, including biomedical engineering, neuroscience, computer science, clinical medicine, electrical engineering, mathematics, mechanical engineering, psychology, education, etc. In the next two years, Neural Galaxy aims to recruit 300-400 researchers, engineers, clinicians, and doctors to further its mission of conquering brain disorders.
“As a front-runner in the brain industry, we are interdisciplinary by nature and by design”, says Coach Wei, co-founder and CEO of Neural Galaxy. “Our goal is to be the most impactful company in the world in understanding, protecting, and augmenting brain functions. We aim to be a company that cultivates future industry leaders. We are actively recruiting in many areas, such as project management, product management, brain science, medical physicians, software engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and manufacturing. We look forward to having more like-minded people joining us to usher in the trillion-dollar brain industry together!”
About Neural Galaxy, Inc.
Neural Galaxy is a brain science company with a mission to treat brain disorders and build strong intelligence. Based on scientific breakthroughs from over a decade of research at Harvard, Neural Galaxy delivers technology products that enable a deep understanding of our brains, the discovery of the neural mechanism underlying brain disorders, and the achievement of effective diagnosis and treatment. For more information, please visit www.neuralgalaxy.com.
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