Where We Are Investing Now: Neuroscience and Delightful Moments
Neuroscience has been a focus area for our funds for over five years. Now, as we emerge from this global experience of shared pandemic-induced stress and anxiety, the importance of new modes for modulating emotions stands at an all-time high. According to a report from Rock Health, US mental health companies raised $5.4 billion in venture funding across the first six months of 2020 alone.
Empowering individuals to improve their happiness and wellbeing through science is core to our investment thesis. The mind can heal the body; the body can heal the mind; both can free people to pursue happiness as they define it.
The challenge in neuroscience early-stage investing is identifying companies that can deliver a realm marketable product. Many startups in this space have brilliant science, but not fully packaged; the companies often lack effective business models or require more from individuals in order to deliver benefits than we feel people are likely to give.
We seek companies that have not only truly innovative underlying science, but also clear go-to-market strategies and strong management. We’re looking for companies in these areas, as exemplified by thriving companies in our current portfolio:
- Solutions that can manipulate our internal environment to reduce stress or induce delight in some form (like Embr Labs, Empathic Technologies, and Neurosity).
- Solutions that can shift us into a state that lets us cope, sleep, or otherwise achieve a delightful or beneficial outcome (like Limbic, Gray Matters, Noctrix, Elemind, and CognifiSense).
- Solutions that can directly interface with our neurological networks and chemistry in powerful new ways (like Paradromics and NeoSensory).
- Companies that continuously monitor our state and change to adjust the environment, tying our inner selves to the outside environment in powerful new ways (like Idun).
As we look towards the future, we will also keep an eye out for companies that:
- Elevate or enhance our innate capacity for delight, not simply to momentarily induce it.
- Provide sensory feedback/monitoring that adapts our external environment to the needs of our brains in an ambient, no-action-required-by-the-individual way.
- Establish new pathways at a neurochemical level, e.g., food as mood, food as medicine, drink as a neurotransmitter channel, microbiome as a brain mediator.
We feel everyone on earth deserves to have a strong, healthy mind, and in our pursuit of empowering individuals to live longer and live better, we will continue to seek out the best companies worldwide striving to achieve that goal.
If you know any great entrepreneurs focused on innovative neuroscience, we would love to hear about them.
By Managing Partner Mike Edelhart
@MikeEdelhart
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