Posts tagged HealthTech Investments
Strive Tech Raises $6 Million Series A Round

Strive, a technology company primarily focused on measuring and analyzing muscle data for athletes, has raised $6 million in a Series A funding round.

Future Communities led the round, with participation from previous investors such as SeaChange Fund and SeedtoB Capital.

New investors included Indianapolis Colts running back Jonathan Taylor, who led the NFL in 2021 with 1,811 rushing yards and 18 rushing touchdowns, and Troy Smith, a former NFL quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s top player while at Ohio State in 2006.

Strive works with numerous athletes and teams, including the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs and the University of Kentucky’s men’s basketball program. The company has sensors that can be inserted into compression clothing and track muscle activity to measure fatigue, load symmetry and other variables. The company offers a hardware and software platform and helps athletes train and avoid and recover from injuries.

Cognixion Raises $12 Million to Enhance Assisted Reality (AR) Tech for Communication Disabilities

Funding round led by Prime Movers Lab, including Northwell Health, Amazon Alexa Fund and Volta Circle

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Nov 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Nov 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Cognixion®, a neural interface startup, raised $12 million in seed funding to develop AI-powered neural interfaces that unlock speech and smart home controls for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide with communication and physical disabilities. The funding will help Cognixion develop new adaptive interfaces that make the Assisted Reality technology easier to use by everyone. Prime Movers Lab led the round with co-investors Northwell Health, Amazon Alexa Fund and Volta Circle.

 

Cognixion’s patented non-invasive, wireless brain-computer interface with an integrated augmented reality display, Cognixion ONE, detects the signals from the user's brainwaves associated with visual fixation on interactive objects and enables hands-free, voice-free control of AR/XR applications in the headset. Cognixion ONE is a closed-loop device that stimulates the visual cortex within the brain and reads its activity while sending control signals back to the AR application. It also integrates with leading research software.

 

In addition to Cognixion ONE, the company is building advanced machine learning algorithms and an AI-powered language system, which adapts to each user's unique communication style, making it more efficient at recognizing and anticipating what they intend to communicate. Equally exciting, a Cognixion headset user will be able to interface directly with Amazon Alexa from anywhere, accessing the smart assistant’s functions within the headset to interact with their environment and control smart devices, or access news, music, information and more.

 

“Cognixion is solving usability and accessibility issues for AR/XR and enabling new capabilities for people with disabilities today,” says Andreas Forsland, Cognixion Founder and CEO, “And in the near future, we see our innovations becoming a fundamental part of the metaverse, as a biological interface plus highly adaptive algorithms that unlock new use cases for XR.”

 

“We believe that technology should be inclusive and universally accessible to every individual, and everyone deserves a solution that can adapt to their needs – and that it’s possible to build ONE solution that can be personalized for communication, information access, interacting with smart devices, and everything else life has to offer,” Andreas Forsland said. “Prime Movers Lab has the same focus around making augmentative human capabilities a reality. Unlike most VCs, Prime Movers Lab is an extension of our team. In addition to the funding that they are providing, they are already helping us with hiring, marketing, government relations and building a pipeline of prospective customers.”

 

“Cognixion has created a breakthrough human-machine interface that accelerates and enriches human communication and connection,” Prime Movers Lab General Partner, Amy Kruse said. “You would think that Cognixion ONE is something out of science fiction if it didn’t already exist.  We believe that it will be a fundamentally life-changing and integral blend of an AI software platform with hardware to assist people of all ages who live with speech and motor disabilities, including Cerebral Palsy, Brainstem Stroke, ALS and many other conditions. Further we see the broader expansion of this platform to extend to all users to enrich life experiences, including: gaming, apps, the metaverse, and beyond. ”

 

“Cognixion ONE’s combination of visual stimulation and EEG reading could profoundly change the means of communication for patients with physical and neurological impairments,” said Dr. Souhel Najjar, SVP and Executive Director of the Neurology Service Line at Northwell Health. “We look forward to collaborating with the Cognixion team as they develop this technology and assess its efficacy in addressing this significant challenge.”

 

“Cognixion’s technology has the potential to revolutionize the way patients with impairments can communicate in a variety of settings. We believe Northwell’s investment and expertise will support Cognixion’s expansion into health care provider markets,” said Rich Mulry, President and CEO of Northwell Holdings & Ventures.

Click here to find more information about Cognixion ONE and to submit interest for pre-order.

If you’d like to work at Cognixion, click here to preview career opportunities.






About Cognixion

Cognixion is an internationally award-winning neuroscience and technology company pioneering the field of Assisted Reality.  Cognixion develops AI powered non-invasive BCI (Brain Computer Interface), assistive tech, and useful applications for people, including those affected by neurodevelopmental disorders and injuries to the brain and spinal cord. Based in Santa Barbara, California, the company develops software that helps people with communication challenges express themselves significantly faster than any other solution on the market, and provides a direct non-verbal interface to control Alexa enabled devices around the home, school and workplace.  For more information, please visit https://cognixion.com.




About Prime Movers Lab

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture and human augmentation. Portfolio investments span in-space transportation, industrial solar heat, ag tech, brain upgrades, nanostructured materials, wafer slicing, prosthetics, 3D printing, mobility, longevity and AI. For more information, please visit https://www.primemoverslab.com.




About Northwell Health

Northwell Health is New York State’s largest health care provider and private employer, with 23 hospitals, 830 outpatient facilities and more than 16,600 affiliated physicians. We care for over two million people annually in the New York metro area and beyond, thanks to philanthropic support from our communities. Our 77,000 employees – 18,900 nurses and 4,800 employed doctors, including members of Northwell Health Physician Partners – are working to change health care for the better. We’re making breakthroughs in medicine at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. We're training the next generation of medical professionals at the visionary Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and the Hofstra Northwell School of Nursing and Physician Assistant Studies. For information on our more than 100 medical specialties, visit Northwell.edu and follow us @NorthwellHealth on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Transformative Tech, NeuroTech, and Biohacking - Fundraising in 2020 and 2021

Video Presentation of the HealthTech, Biohacking and Transformative Technology Investment Market

A research report on the state of Transformative Tech investing in 2021 by Wesley King from Coherent Capital, followed by a panel with: - Alina Trigubenko: C...

Levels Raises $12M Seed to bring Glucose Insights Mainstream
Levels constantly tracks the user’s blood sugar using a CGM placed on the back of the upper arm for two weeks.

Levels constantly tracks the user’s blood sugar using a CGM placed on the back of the upper arm for two weeks.

Levels Health announced a $12 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz  with additional notable investors participating, including Marc Randolph (co-founder of Netflix), Dick Costolo (former CEO of Twitter and investor in Oura), Michael Arrington (founder of TechCrunch) and others.

The funds will help Levels bring its metabolic sensor application to market. The user-friendly platform pairs continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) with the Levels software suite to provide users with new, deep, and actionable insights about their health. The company’s founders strongly feel that this approach helps users build a tighter feedback loop between food, exercise, sleep and well-being.

The closed beta program provides a month-long subscription and includes two 14-day CGM sensors and access to the Levels app. The company has nearly 50K people on their waitlist.