u/NeurotechNewsletter

Hey
I’m a neurotech recruiter and i write about the investment in the industry on my substack. Thought there might be some interesting bits of info in my Q2 investment review for you

BCI’s get a lot of attention, as well as a bunch of wearables but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. One of the most interesting signals of the quarter came from overactive bladder, which is not usually where people start when they want to talk about the future of the brain, but it is exactly the sort of market investors seem increasingly willing to back.

BlueWind Medical raised $47.8M to accelerate commercialization of Revi, its implantable tibial neuromodulation system for urgency urinary incontinence, while NinaMED raised $13.75M to advance the NiNA System for overactive bladder. That does not mean bladder suddenly became the main story in neurotech, but it does show something important about where the category is heading. Investors are backing large, real, underserved patient populations where the clinical pathway is reasonably clear and the value proposition makes sense to the people who pay for healthcare.

That was the broader Q2 story. Neurotech funding did not only go to the most futuristic or headline-friendly companies. A lot of it went into the practical middle of medicine, where devices treat large, expensive, persistent conditions that already fill clinics. The pattern was less about one specific technology and more about commercial logic. Pain, sleep, tremor, bladder, paralysis, depression, and implantable infrastructure all attracted meaningful capital because they sit close to real patients, existing clinical workflows, and markets that can be explained without too much science fiction.

You could see this across the quarter. Cala Health secured $50M from Trinity Capital to support commercial expansion of its wearable therapy for hand tremor. Nervonik raised a $52.5M Series B for peripheral nerve stimulation in chronic pain. ONWARD Medical raised €40.6M, including a €25M investment from EQT Life Sciences, to extend the runway for its spinal cord stimulation platforms for people with spinal cord injury. SonoMind raised €20M, roughly $23M, to advance focused ultrasound for treatment-resistant depression. WISE raised €30M to move its Heron lead and wider implantable electrode platform toward broader adoption.

The common thread is not that all these companies are doing the same thing. They are not. Some are wearable, some are implantable, some are focused ultrasound, some are spinal cord stimulation, some are peripheral nerve stimulation. The common thread is that they are tied to problems with real clinical gravity. These are conditions where patients already move through the healthcare system, where physicians already understand the burden, and where payers can at least begin to understand the economic argument if the evidence is good enough.

The biggest signals of the quarter were actually strategic, not venture. Medtronic announced its intent to acquire SPR Therapeutics for approximately $650M, bringing temporary peripheral nerve stimulation further into one of the largest neuromodulation portfolios in the world. ResMed completed its $340M acquisition of Noctrix Health, adding a wearable neuromodulation therapy for restless legs syndrome to a sleep business that already has global commercial infrastructure. Those two transactions alone say a lot about where the market is maturing. Strategic buyers are not just watching neurotech from the sidelines. They are moving where the products fit an existing channel, an existing disease area, and an existing commercial machine.

Sleep was one of the clearest examples of that. Nyxoah secured $110M in aggregate financing to accelerate the US commercial launch of Genio, its hypoglossal nerve stimulation system for obstructive sleep apnea. ResMed buying Noctrix added another major sleep-related neuromodulation signal, although the disease area is different. Sleep is interesting because it sits in a very useful place. Patients understand the problem, physicians understand the market, and strategics already have the infrastructure. That does not make reimbursement or adoption easy, but it does mean the category is not starting from zero.

Pain sent a similar message. Medtronic’s planned SPR acquisition and Nervonik’s Series B both point to a pain market that is still moving beyond the old spinal cord stimulation playbook. Temporary PNS, smarter PNS, peripheral approaches, and less invasive interventions are all part of the same broader shift. The question is not just whether stimulation works. The question is where it fits in the patient journey, how early it can be used, whether it can reduce reliance on more destructive or expensive options, and whether it can produce the kind of outcomes that payers and clinicians will actually care about.

BCI still had a serious quarter, but it was a different kind of funding pattern. Axoft raised an oversubscribed $55M Series A to advance its soft implantable BCI. Neurosoft Bioelectronics raised a $7.5M seed round for stretchable brain interfaces. Shanghai’s StairMed raised RMB 500M, around $72.8M, in a round led by Alibaba, with Tencent and others involved. These are real companies doing real work, and the soft-implant race underneath the BCI headlines is one of the more interesting technical stories in the sector.

But BCI still looks different from the rest of the market. It is more concentrated. It is more dependent on a smaller number of high-conviction bets. It attracts people and institutions that are comfortable with long timelines, difficult clinical translation, and outcomes that may not look like standard medical device returns. That does not make it less important. It just means we should be careful not to confuse a few very visible BCI financings with a broad commercial wave across the whole category.

That distinction is important because the rest of Q2 was not really about chasing the most futuristic version of neurotech. It was about backing companies that can move through clinical, regulatory, and commercial pathways with some discipline. If the BCI story is still partly about what neurotechnology might become, the neuromodulation and sleep and pain story is more about what neurotechnology can already start to become inside normal medicine.

Compared with Q1, the shape of the money felt different. Q1 was more top-heavy, with Science Corporation’s $230M Series C for PRIMA and Cognito Therapeutics’ $105M Series C for Alzheimer’s doing a lot of the work in the overall narrative. Q2 felt broader. It had major M&A at the top, but beneath that it had a thicker layer of serious financings across multiple indications and stages. It was not one or two giant rounds defining the quarter. It was a wider set of companies pulling capital into markets that investors can understand.

This is where the methodology matters. If you only count private company financings, Q2 looks steady rather than explosive. If you include M&A, the quarter looks much bigger because Medtronic/SPR and ResMed/Noctrix together represent close to $1B of strategic deal value. If you include funds, grants, and neuroscience-adjacent AI, the picture changes again. That is why I would be careful with one clean headline number. The better point is not that Q2 was simply bigger or smaller than Q1. The better point is that the shape of the quarter looked more mature.

The other part I would not ignore is the capital infrastructure forming underneath the sector. Newfund closed HEKA, a €60M fund focused on brain technologies. Ground Effect Ventures emerged as an operator-led platform for brain-focused medical technologies. Protocol Labs has continued to build out its neurotechnology activity. ARPA-H announced the first research teams for EVIDENT, a $139M initiative focused on improving measurement and treatment development in behavioral health. None of that is as easy to write about as a big company round, but it matters because sectors become real when the funding infrastructure starts organizing around them.

A company raise tells you someone liked one asset. A fund close tells you someone thinks the category itself is worth building around. The same is true for strategic buyers, public programs, clinical infrastructure, reimbursement pathways, specialist operators, and all the boring parts of market formation that rarely make the headline but end up deciding whether a technology actually reaches patients.

So the real Q2 story was not just that bladder had a good quarter, or that BCI still pulled capital, or that sleep attracted strategic buyers. It was that neurotech looked more investable when it looked like medicine. The strongest signals sat in categories with large patient populations, clear burden, defined clinical workflows, and a plausible route to adoption.

That does not mean every company in those areas will win, or that reimbursement will be easy, or that commercial execution suddenly becomes straightforward. But it does suggest the market is rewarding practicality in a way that feels healthy.
The future-facing side of neurotech is still alive. The BCI companies are building. The soft implants are getting better. The brain-inspired AI world is pulling in huge capital. The frontier remains exciting. But Q2 also showed that the sector does not need every company to become Neuralink to matter. It needs more companies that can treat real conditions, produce evidence, get paid, and survive long enough to become part of routine care.

That is what made the quarter interesting. It was not the loudest version of neurotech. It was the more practical version. Pain, sleep, bladder, tremor, paralysis, depression, and the infrastructure underneath the sector all had meaningful moments. Q2 looked less like a market waiting for one impossible breakthrough and more like a group of companies slowly working their way into normal medicine. For neurotech, that might be the better story

I run a neurotech recruitment, market data and media business and finally did something I had been putting off, placing every funded company by headquarters and then doing the same for the investors. 564 companies, 107 investors I could confirm. 330 of the companies are American, and all of Europe combined is 165. The investor side is even more concentrated, 81 of the 107 are US-based. What struck me is that US investors clearly fund a lot of the non-US companies too, so the geographic gap in where the money comes from is even wider than where the companies are. Happy to talk through the method or the gaps in the comments. Full write-up with the charts and the investor list is linked below.

I run a neurotech recruitment, market data and media business and finally did something I had been putting off, placing every funded company by headquarters and then doing the same for the investors. 564 companies, 107 investors I could confirm. 330 of the companies are American, and all of Europe combined is 165. The investor side is even more concentrated, 81 of the 107 are US-based. What struck me is that US investors clearly fund a lot of the non-US companies too, so the geographic gap in where the money comes from is even wider than where the companies are. Happy to talk through the method or the gaps in the comments. Full write-up with the charts and the investor list is linked below.

I run a neurotech recruitment, market data and media business and finally did something I had been putting off, placing every funded company by headquarters and then doing the same for the investors. 564 companies, 107 investors I could confirm. 330 of the companies are American, and all of Europe combined is 165. The investor side is even more concentrated, 81 of the 107 are US-based. What struck me is that US investors clearly fund a lot of the non-US companies too, so the geographic gap in where the money comes from is even wider than where the companies are. Happy to talk through the method or the gaps in the comments. Full write-up with the charts and the investor list is linked below.

I know I have talked about the unglamorous side of neurotech a lot before, but Q2 made the point hard to avoid again. One of the most interesting signals of the quarter came from overactive bladder, which is not usually where people start when they want to talk about the future of the brain, but it is exactly the sort of market investors seem increasingly willing to back.

BlueWind Medical raised $47.8M to accelerate commercialization of Revi, its implantable tibial neuromodulation system for urgency urinary incontinence, while NinaMED raised $13.75M to advance the NiNA System for overactive bladder. That does not mean bladder suddenly became the main story in neurotech, but it does show something important about where the category is heading. Investors are backing large, real, underserved patient populations where the clinical pathway is reasonably clear and the value proposition makes sense to the people who pay for healthcare.

That was the broader Q2 story. Neurotech funding did not only go to the most futuristic or headline-friendly companies. A lot of it went into the practical middle of medicine, where devices treat large, expensive, persistent conditions that already fill clinics. The pattern was less about one specific technology and more about commercial logic. Pain, sleep, tremor, bladder, paralysis, depression, and implantable infrastructure all attracted meaningful capital because they sit close to real patients, existing clinical workflows, and markets that can be explained without too much science fiction.

You could see this across the quarter. Cala Health secured $50M from Trinity Capital to support commercial expansion of its wearable therapy for hand tremor. Nervonik raised a $52.5M Series B for peripheral nerve stimulation in chronic pain. ONWARD Medical raised €40.6M, including a €25M investment from EQT Life Sciences, to extend the runway for its spinal cord stimulation platforms for people with spinal cord injury. SonoMind raised €20M, roughly $23M, to advance focused ultrasound for treatment-resistant depression. WISE raised €30M to move its Heron lead and wider implantable electrode platform toward broader adoption.

The common thread is not that all these companies are doing the same thing. They are not. Some are wearable, some are implantable, some are focused ultrasound, some are spinal cord stimulation, some are peripheral nerve stimulation. The common thread is that they are tied to problems with real clinical gravity. These are conditions where patients already move through the healthcare system, where physicians already understand the burden, and where payers can at least begin to understand the economic argument if the evidence is good enough.

The biggest signals of the quarter were actually strategic, not venture. Medtronic announced its intent to acquire SPR Therapeutics for approximately $650M, bringing temporary peripheral nerve stimulation further into one of the largest neuromodulation portfolios in the world. ResMed completed its $340M acquisition of Noctrix Health, adding a wearable neuromodulation therapy for restless legs syndrome to a sleep business that already has global commercial infrastructure. Those two transactions alone say a lot about where the market is maturing. Strategic buyers are not just watching neurotech from the sidelines. They are moving where the products fit an existing channel, an existing disease area, and an existing commercial machine.

Sleep was one of the clearest examples of that. Nyxoah secured $110M in aggregate financing to accelerate the US commercial launch of Genio, its hypoglossal nerve stimulation system for obstructive sleep apnea. ResMed buying Noctrix added another major sleep-related neuromodulation signal, although the disease area is different. Sleep is interesting because it sits in a very useful place. Patients understand the problem, physicians understand the market, and strategics already have the infrastructure. That does not make reimbursement or adoption easy, but it does mean the category is not starting from zero.

Pain sent a similar message. Medtronic’s planned SPR acquisition and Nervonik’s Series B both point to a pain market that is still moving beyond the old spinal cord stimulation playbook. Temporary PNS, smarter PNS, peripheral approaches, and less invasive interventions are all part of the same broader shift. The question is not just whether stimulation works. The question is where it fits in the patient journey, how early it can be used, whether it can reduce reliance on more destructive or expensive options, and whether it can produce the kind of outcomes that payers and clinicians will actually care about.

BCI still had a serious quarter, but it was a different kind of funding pattern. Axoft raised an oversubscribed $55M Series A to advance its soft implantable BCI. Neurosoft Bioelectronics raised a $7.5M seed round for stretchable brain interfaces. Shanghai’s StairMed raised RMB 500M, around $72.8M, in a round led by Alibaba, with Tencent and others involved. These are real companies doing real work, and the soft-implant race underneath the BCI headlines is one of the more interesting technical stories in the sector.

But BCI still looks different from the rest of the market. It is more concentrated. It is more dependent on a smaller number of high-conviction bets. It attracts people and institutions that are comfortable with long timelines, difficult clinical translation, and outcomes that may not look like standard medical device returns. That does not make it less important. It just means we should be careful not to confuse a few very visible BCI financings with a broad commercial wave across the whole category.

That distinction is important because the rest of Q2 was not really about chasing the most futuristic version of neurotech. It was about backing companies that can move through clinical, regulatory, and commercial pathways with some discipline. If the BCI story is still partly about what neurotechnology might become, the neuromodulation and sleep and pain story is more about what neurotechnology can already start to become inside normal medicine.

Compared with Q1, the shape of the money felt different. Q1 was more top-heavy, with Science Corporation’s $230M Series C for PRIMA and Cognito Therapeutics’ $105M Series C for Alzheimer’s doing a lot of the work in the overall narrative. Q2 felt broader. It had major M&A at the top, but beneath that it had a thicker layer of serious financings across multiple indications and stages. It was not one or two giant rounds defining the quarter. It was a wider set of companies pulling capital into markets that investors can understand.

This is where the methodology matters. If you only count private company financings, Q2 looks steady rather than explosive. If you include M&A, the quarter looks much bigger because Medtronic/SPR and ResMed/Noctrix together represent close to $1B of strategic deal value. If you include funds, grants, and neuroscience-adjacent AI, the picture changes again. That is why I would be careful with one clean headline number. The better point is not that Q2 was simply bigger or smaller than Q1. The better point is that the shape of the quarter looked more mature.

The other part I would not ignore is the capital infrastructure forming underneath the sector. Newfund closed HEKA, a €60M fund focused on brain technologies. Ground Effect Ventures emerged as an operator-led platform for brain-focused medical technologies. Protocol Labs has continued to build out its neurotechnology activity. ARPA-H announced the first research teams for EVIDENT, a $139M initiative focused on improving measurement and treatment development in behavioral health. None of that is as easy to write about as a big company round, but it matters because sectors become real when the funding infrastructure starts organizing around them.

A company raise tells you someone liked one asset. A fund close tells you someone thinks the category itself is worth building around. The same is true for strategic buyers, public programs, clinical infrastructure, reimbursement pathways, specialist operators, and all the boring parts of market formation that rarely make the headline but end up deciding whether a technology actually reaches patients.

So the real Q2 story was not just that bladder had a good quarter, or that BCI still pulled capital, or that sleep attracted strategic buyers. It was that neurotech looked more investable when it looked like medicine. The strongest signals sat in categories with large patient populations, clear burden, defined clinical workflows, and a plausible route to adoption.

That does not mean every company in those areas will win, or that reimbursement will be easy, or that commercial execution suddenly becomes straightforward. But it does suggest the market is rewarding practicality in a way that feels healthy.
The future-facing side of neurotech is still alive. The BCI companies are building. The soft implants are getting better. The brain-inspired AI world is pulling in huge capital. The frontier remains exciting. But Q2 also showed that the sector does not need every company to become Neuralink to matter. It needs more companies that can treat real conditions, produce evidence, get paid, and survive long enough to become part of routine care.

That is what made the quarter interesting. It was not the loudest version of neurotech. It was the more practical version. Pain, sleep, bladder, tremor, paralysis, depression, and the infrastructure underneath the sector all had meaningful moments. Q2 looked less like a market waiting for one impossible breakthrough and more like a group of companies slowly working their way into normal medicine. For neurotech, that might be the better story

I know I have talked about the unglamorous side of neurotech a lot before, but Q2 made the point hard to avoid again. One of the most interesting signals of the quarter came from overactive bladder, which is not usually where people start when they want to talk about the future of the brain, but it is exactly the sort of market investors seem increasingly willing to back.

BlueWind Medical raised $47.8M to accelerate commercialization of Revi, its implantable tibial neuromodulation system for urgency urinary incontinence, while NinaMED raised $13.75M to advance the NiNA System for overactive bladder. That does not mean bladder suddenly became the main story in neurotech, but it does show something important about where the category is heading. Investors are backing large, real, underserved patient populations where the clinical pathway is reasonably clear and the value proposition makes sense to the people who pay for healthcare.

That was the broader Q2 story. Neurotech funding did not only go to the most futuristic or headline-friendly companies. A lot of it went into the practical middle of medicine, where devices treat large, expensive, persistent conditions that already fill clinics. The pattern was less about one specific technology and more about commercial logic. Pain, sleep, tremor, bladder, paralysis, depression, and implantable infrastructure all attracted meaningful capital because they sit close to real patients, existing clinical workflows, and markets that can be explained without too much science fiction.

You could see this across the quarter. Cala Health secured $50M from Trinity Capital to support commercial expansion of its wearable therapy for hand tremor. Nervonik raised a $52.5M Series B for peripheral nerve stimulation in chronic pain. ONWARD Medical raised €40.6M, including a €25M investment from EQT Life Sciences, to extend the runway for its spinal cord stimulation platforms for people with spinal cord injury. SonoMind raised €20M, roughly $23M, to advance focused ultrasound for treatment-resistant depression. WISE raised €30M to move its Heron lead and wider implantable electrode platform toward broader adoption.

The common thread is not that all these companies are doing the same thing. They are not. Some are wearable, some are implantable, some are focused ultrasound, some are spinal cord stimulation, some are peripheral nerve stimulation. The common thread is that they are tied to problems with real clinical gravity. These are conditions where patients already move through the healthcare system, where physicians already understand the burden, and where payers can at least begin to understand the economic argument if the evidence is good enough.

The biggest signals of the quarter were actually strategic, not venture. Medtronic announced its intent to acquire SPR Therapeutics for approximately $650M, bringing temporary peripheral nerve stimulation further into one of the largest neuromodulation portfolios in the world. ResMed completed its $340M acquisition of Noctrix Health, adding a wearable neuromodulation therapy for restless legs syndrome to a sleep business that already has global commercial infrastructure. Those two transactions alone say a lot about where the market is maturing. Strategic buyers are not just watching neurotech from the sidelines. They are moving where the products fit an existing channel, an existing disease area, and an existing commercial machine.

Sleep was one of the clearest examples of that. Nyxoah secured $110M in aggregate financing to accelerate the US commercial launch of Genio, its hypoglossal nerve stimulation system for obstructive sleep apnea. ResMed buying Noctrix added another major sleep-related neuromodulation signal, although the disease area is different. Sleep is interesting because it sits in a very useful place. Patients understand the problem, physicians understand the market, and strategics already have the infrastructure. That does not make reimbursement or adoption easy, but it does mean the category is not starting from zero.

Pain sent a similar message. Medtronic’s planned SPR acquisition and Nervonik’s Series B both point to a pain market that is still moving beyond the old spinal cord stimulation playbook. Temporary PNS, smarter PNS, peripheral approaches, and less invasive interventions are all part of the same broader shift. The question is not just whether stimulation works. The question is where it fits in the patient journey, how early it can be used, whether it can reduce reliance on more destructive or expensive options, and whether it can produce the kind of outcomes that payers and clinicians will actually care about.

BCI still had a serious quarter, but it was a different kind of funding pattern. Axoft raised an oversubscribed $55M Series A to advance its soft implantable BCI. Neurosoft Bioelectronics raised a $7.5M seed round for stretchable brain interfaces. Shanghai’s StairMed raised RMB 500M, around $72.8M, in a round led by Alibaba, with Tencent and others involved. These are real companies doing real work, and the soft-implant race underneath the BCI headlines is one of the more interesting technical stories in the sector.

But BCI still looks different from the rest of the market. It is more concentrated. It is more dependent on a smaller number of high-conviction bets. It attracts people and institutions that are comfortable with long timelines, difficult clinical translation, and outcomes that may not look like standard medical device returns. That does not make it less important. It just means we should be careful not to confuse a few very visible BCI financings with a broad commercial wave across the whole category.

That distinction is important because the rest of Q2 was not really about chasing the most futuristic version of neurotech. It was about backing companies that can move through clinical, regulatory, and commercial pathways with some discipline. If the BCI story is still partly about what neurotechnology might become, the neuromodulation and sleep and pain story is more about what neurotechnology can already start to become inside normal medicine.

Compared with Q1, the shape of the money felt different. Q1 was more top-heavy, with Science Corporation’s $230M Series C for PRIMA and Cognito Therapeutics’ $105M Series C for Alzheimer’s doing a lot of the work in the overall narrative. Q2 felt broader. It had major M&A at the top, but beneath that it had a thicker layer of serious financings across multiple indications and stages. It was not one or two giant rounds defining the quarter. It was a wider set of companies pulling capital into markets that investors can understand.

This is where the methodology matters. If you only count private company financings, Q2 looks steady rather than explosive. If you include M&A, the quarter looks much bigger because Medtronic/SPR and ResMed/Noctrix together represent close to $1B of strategic deal value. If you include funds, grants, and neuroscience-adjacent AI, the picture changes again. That is why I would be careful with one clean headline number. The better point is not that Q2 was simply bigger or smaller than Q1. The better point is that the shape of the quarter looked more mature.

The other part I would not ignore is the capital infrastructure forming underneath the sector. Newfund closed HEKA, a €60M fund focused on brain technologies. Ground Effect Ventures emerged as an operator-led platform for brain-focused medical technologies. Protocol Labs has continued to build out its neurotechnology activity. ARPA-H announced the first research teams for EVIDENT, a $139M initiative focused on improving measurement and treatment development in behavioral health. None of that is as easy to write about as a big company round, but it matters because sectors become real when the funding infrastructure starts organizing around them.

A company raise tells you someone liked one asset. A fund close tells you someone thinks the category itself is worth building around. The same is true for strategic buyers, public programs, clinical infrastructure, reimbursement pathways, specialist operators, and all the boring parts of market formation that rarely make the headline but end up deciding whether a technology actually reaches patients.

So the real Q2 story was not just that bladder had a good quarter, or that BCI still pulled capital, or that sleep attracted strategic buyers. It was that neurotech looked more investable when it looked like medicine. The strongest signals sat in categories with large patient populations, clear burden, defined clinical workflows, and a plausible route to adoption.

That does not mean every company in those areas will win, or that reimbursement will be easy, or that commercial execution suddenly becomes straightforward. But it does suggest the market is rewarding practicality in a way that feels healthy.
The future-facing side of neurotech is still alive. The BCI companies are building. The soft implants are getting better. The brain-inspired AI world is pulling in huge capital. The frontier remains exciting. But Q2 also showed that the sector does not need every company to become Neuralink to matter. It needs more companies that can treat real conditions, produce evidence, get paid, and survive long enough to become part of routine care.

That is what made the quarter interesting. It was not the loudest version of neurotech. It was the more practical version. Pain, sleep, bladder, tremor, paralysis, depression, and the infrastructure underneath the sector all had meaningful moments. Q2 looked less like a market waiting for one impossible breakthrough and more like a group of companies slowly working their way into normal medicine. For neurotech, that might be the better story

I know I have talked about the unglamorous side of neurotech a lot before, but Q2 made the point hard to avoid again. One of the most interesting signals of the quarter came from overactive bladder, which is not usually where people start when they want to talk about the future of the brain, but it is exactly the sort of market investors seem increasingly willing to back.

BlueWind Medical raised $47.8M to accelerate commercialization of Revi, its implantable tibial neuromodulation system for urgency urinary incontinence, while NinaMED raised $13.75M to advance the NiNA System for overactive bladder. That does not mean bladder suddenly became the main story in neurotech, but it does show something important about where the category is heading. Investors are backing large, real, underserved patient populations where the clinical pathway is reasonably clear and the value proposition makes sense to the people who pay for healthcare.

That was the broader Q2 story. Neurotech funding did not only go to the most futuristic or headline-friendly companies. A lot of it went into the practical middle of medicine, where devices treat large, expensive, persistent conditions that already fill clinics. The pattern was less about one specific technology and more about commercial logic. Pain, sleep, tremor, bladder, paralysis, depression, and implantable infrastructure all attracted meaningful capital because they sit close to real patients, existing clinical workflows, and markets that can be explained without too much science fiction.

You could see this across the quarter. Cala Health secured $50M from Trinity Capital to support commercial expansion of its wearable therapy for hand tremor. Nervonik raised a $52.5M Series B for peripheral nerve stimulation in chronic pain. ONWARD Medical raised €40.6M, including a €25M investment from EQT Life Sciences, to extend the runway for its spinal cord stimulation platforms for people with spinal cord injury. SonoMind raised €20M, roughly $23M, to advance focused ultrasound for treatment-resistant depression. WISE raised €30M to move its Heron lead and wider implantable electrode platform toward broader adoption.

The common thread is not that all these companies are doing the same thing. They are not. Some are wearable, some are implantable, some are focused ultrasound, some are spinal cord stimulation, some are peripheral nerve stimulation. The common thread is that they are tied to problems with real clinical gravity. These are conditions where patients already move through the healthcare system, where physicians already understand the burden, and where payers can at least begin to understand the economic argument if the evidence is good enough.

The biggest signals of the quarter were actually strategic, not venture. Medtronic announced its intent to acquire SPR Therapeutics for approximately $650M, bringing temporary peripheral nerve stimulation further into one of the largest neuromodulation portfolios in the world. ResMed completed its $340M acquisition of Noctrix Health, adding a wearable neuromodulation therapy for restless legs syndrome to a sleep business that already has global commercial infrastructure. Those two transactions alone say a lot about where the market is maturing. Strategic buyers are not just watching neurotech from the sidelines. They are moving where the products fit an existing channel, an existing disease area, and an existing commercial machine.

Sleep was one of the clearest examples of that. Nyxoah secured $110M in aggregate financing to accelerate the US commercial launch of Genio, its hypoglossal nerve stimulation system for obstructive sleep apnea. ResMed buying Noctrix added another major sleep-related neuromodulation signal, although the disease area is different. Sleep is interesting because it sits in a very useful place. Patients understand the problem, physicians understand the market, and strategics already have the infrastructure. That does not make reimbursement or adoption easy, but it does mean the category is not starting from zero.

Pain sent a similar message. Medtronic’s planned SPR acquisition and Nervonik’s Series B both point to a pain market that is still moving beyond the old spinal cord stimulation playbook. Temporary PNS, smarter PNS, peripheral approaches, and less invasive interventions are all part of the same broader shift. The question is not just whether stimulation works. The question is where it fits in the patient journey, how early it can be used, whether it can reduce reliance on more destructive or expensive options, and whether it can produce the kind of outcomes that payers and clinicians will actually care about.

BCI still had a serious quarter, but it was a different kind of funding pattern. Axoft raised an oversubscribed $55M Series A to advance its soft implantable BCI. Neurosoft Bioelectronics raised a $7.5M seed round for stretchable brain interfaces. Shanghai’s StairMed raised RMB 500M, around $72.8M, in a round led by Alibaba, with Tencent and others involved. These are real companies doing real work, and the soft-implant race underneath the BCI headlines is one of the more interesting technical stories in the sector.

But BCI still looks different from the rest of the market. It is more concentrated. It is more dependent on a smaller number of high-conviction bets. It attracts people and institutions that are comfortable with long timelines, difficult clinical translation, and outcomes that may not look like standard medical device returns. That does not make it less important. It just means we should be careful not to confuse a few very visible BCI financings with a broad commercial wave across the whole category.

That distinction is important because the rest of Q2 was not really about chasing the most futuristic version of neurotech. It was about backing companies that can move through clinical, regulatory, and commercial pathways with some discipline. If the BCI story is still partly about what neurotechnology might become, the neuromodulation and sleep and pain story is more about what neurotechnology can already start to become inside normal medicine.

Compared with Q1, the shape of the money felt different. Q1 was more top-heavy, with Science Corporation’s $230M Series C for PRIMA and Cognito Therapeutics’ $105M Series C for Alzheimer’s doing a lot of the work in the overall narrative. Q2 felt broader. It had major M&A at the top, but beneath that it had a thicker layer of serious financings across multiple indications and stages. It was not one or two giant rounds defining the quarter. It was a wider set of companies pulling capital into markets that investors can understand.

This is where the methodology matters. If you only count private company financings, Q2 looks steady rather than explosive. If you include M&A, the quarter looks much bigger because Medtronic/SPR and ResMed/Noctrix together represent close to $1B of strategic deal value. If you include funds, grants, and neuroscience-adjacent AI, the picture changes again. That is why I would be careful with one clean headline number. The better point is not that Q2 was simply bigger or smaller than Q1. The better point is that the shape of the quarter looked more mature.

The other part I would not ignore is the capital infrastructure forming underneath the sector. Newfund closed HEKA, a €60M fund focused on brain technologies. Ground Effect Ventures emerged as an operator-led platform for brain-focused medical technologies. Protocol Labs has continued to build out its neurotechnology activity. ARPA-H announced the first research teams for EVIDENT, a $139M initiative focused on improving measurement and treatment development in behavioral health. None of that is as easy to write about as a big company round, but it matters because sectors become real when the funding infrastructure starts organizing around them.

A company raise tells you someone liked one asset. A fund close tells you someone thinks the category itself is worth building around. The same is true for strategic buyers, public programs, clinical infrastructure, reimbursement pathways, specialist operators, and all the boring parts of market formation that rarely make the headline but end up deciding whether a technology actually reaches patients.

So the real Q2 story was not just that bladder had a good quarter, or that BCI still pulled capital, or that sleep attracted strategic buyers. It was that neurotech looked more investable when it looked like medicine. The strongest signals sat in categories with large patient populations, clear burden, defined clinical workflows, and a plausible route to adoption.

That does not mean every company in those areas will win, or that reimbursement will be easy, or that commercial execution suddenly becomes straightforward. But it does suggest the market is rewarding practicality in a way that feels healthy.
The future-facing side of neurotech is still alive. The BCI companies are building. The soft implants are getting better. The brain-inspired AI world is pulling in huge capital. The frontier remains exciting. But Q2 also showed that the sector does not need every company to become Neuralink to matter. It needs more companies that can treat real conditions, produce evidence, get paid, and survive long enough to become part of routine care.

That is what made the quarter interesting. It was not the loudest version of neurotech. It was the more practical version. Pain, sleep, bladder, tremor, paralysis, depression, and the infrastructure underneath the sector all had meaningful moments. Q2 looked less like a market waiting for one impossible breakthrough and more like a group of companies slowly working their way into normal medicine. For neurotech, that might be the better story

I know I have talked about the unglamorous side of neurotech a lot before, but Q2 made the point hard to avoid again. One of the most interesting signals of the quarter came from overactive bladder, which is not usually where people start when they want to talk about the future of the brain, but it is exactly the sort of market investors seem increasingly willing to back.

BlueWind Medical raised $47.8M to accelerate commercialization of Revi, its implantable tibial neuromodulation system for urgency urinary incontinence, while NinaMED raised $13.75M to advance the NiNA System for overactive bladder. That does not mean bladder suddenly became the main story in neurotech, but it does show something important about where the category is heading. Investors are backing large, real, underserved patient populations where the clinical pathway is reasonably clear and the value proposition makes sense to the people who pay for healthcare.

That was the broader Q2 story. Neurotech funding did not only go to the most futuristic or headline-friendly companies. A lot of it went into the practical middle of medicine, where devices treat large, expensive, persistent conditions that already fill clinics. The pattern was less about one specific technology and more about commercial logic. Pain, sleep, tremor, bladder, paralysis, depression, and implantable infrastructure all attracted meaningful capital because they sit close to real patients, existing clinical workflows, and markets that can be explained without too much science fiction.

You could see this across the quarter. Cala Health secured $50M from Trinity Capital to support commercial expansion of its wearable therapy for hand tremor. Nervonik raised a $52.5M Series B for peripheral nerve stimulation in chronic pain. ONWARD Medical raised €40.6M, including a €25M investment from EQT Life Sciences, to extend the runway for its spinal cord stimulation platforms for people with spinal cord injury. SonoMind raised €20M, roughly $23M, to advance focused ultrasound for treatment-resistant depression. WISE raised €30M to move its Heron lead and wider implantable electrode platform toward broader adoption.

The common thread is not that all these companies are doing the same thing. They are not. Some are wearable, some are implantable, some are focused ultrasound, some are spinal cord stimulation, some are peripheral nerve stimulation. The common thread is that they are tied to problems with real clinical gravity. These are conditions where patients already move through the healthcare system, where physicians already understand the burden, and where payers can at least begin to understand the economic argument if the evidence is good enough.

The biggest signals of the quarter were actually strategic, not venture. Medtronic announced its intent to acquire SPR Therapeutics for approximately $650M, bringing temporary peripheral nerve stimulation further into one of the largest neuromodulation portfolios in the world. ResMed completed its $340M acquisition of Noctrix Health, adding a wearable neuromodulation therapy for restless legs syndrome to a sleep business that already has global commercial infrastructure. Those two transactions alone say a lot about where the market is maturing. Strategic buyers are not just watching neurotech from the sidelines. They are moving where the products fit an existing channel, an existing disease area, and an existing commercial machine.

Sleep was one of the clearest examples of that. Nyxoah secured $110M in aggregate financing to accelerate the US commercial launch of Genio, its hypoglossal nerve stimulation system for obstructive sleep apnea. ResMed buying Noctrix added another major sleep-related neuromodulation signal, although the disease area is different. Sleep is interesting because it sits in a very useful place. Patients understand the problem, physicians understand the market, and strategics already have the infrastructure. That does not make reimbursement or adoption easy, but it does mean the category is not starting from zero.

Pain sent a similar message. Medtronic’s planned SPR acquisition and Nervonik’s Series B both point to a pain market that is still moving beyond the old spinal cord stimulation playbook. Temporary PNS, smarter PNS, peripheral approaches, and less invasive interventions are all part of the same broader shift. The question is not just whether stimulation works. The question is where it fits in the patient journey, how early it can be used, whether it can reduce reliance on more destructive or expensive options, and whether it can produce the kind of outcomes that payers and clinicians will actually care about.

BCI still had a serious quarter, but it was a different kind of funding pattern. Axoft raised an oversubscribed $55M Series A to advance its soft implantable BCI. Neurosoft Bioelectronics raised a $7.5M seed round for stretchable brain interfaces. Shanghai’s StairMed raised RMB 500M, around $72.8M, in a round led by Alibaba, with Tencent and others involved. These are real companies doing real work, and the soft-implant race underneath the BCI headlines is one of the more interesting technical stories in the sector.

But BCI still looks different from the rest of the market. It is more concentrated. It is more dependent on a smaller number of high-conviction bets. It attracts people and institutions that are comfortable with long timelines, difficult clinical translation, and outcomes that may not look like standard medical device returns. That does not make it less important. It just means we should be careful not to confuse a few very visible BCI financings with a broad commercial wave across the whole category.

That distinction is important because the rest of Q2 was not really about chasing the most futuristic version of neurotech. It was about backing companies that can move through clinical, regulatory, and commercial pathways with some discipline. If the BCI story is still partly about what neurotechnology might become, the neuromodulation and sleep and pain story is more about what neurotechnology can already start to become inside normal medicine.

Compared with Q1, the shape of the money felt different. Q1 was more top-heavy, with Science Corporation’s $230M Series C for PRIMA and Cognito Therapeutics’ $105M Series C for Alzheimer’s doing a lot of the work in the overall narrative. Q2 felt broader. It had major M&A at the top, but beneath that it had a thicker layer of serious financings across multiple indications and stages. It was not one or two giant rounds defining the quarter. It was a wider set of companies pulling capital into markets that investors can understand.

This is where the methodology matters. If you only count private company financings, Q2 looks steady rather than explosive. If you include M&A, the quarter looks much bigger because Medtronic/SPR and ResMed/Noctrix together represent close to $1B of strategic deal value. If you include funds, grants, and neuroscience-adjacent AI, the picture changes again. That is why I would be careful with one clean headline number. The better point is not that Q2 was simply bigger or smaller than Q1. The better point is that the shape of the quarter looked more mature.

The other part I would not ignore is the capital infrastructure forming underneath the sector. Newfund closed HEKA, a €60M fund focused on brain technologies. Ground Effect Ventures emerged as an operator-led platform for brain-focused medical technologies. Protocol Labs has continued to build out its neurotechnology activity. ARPA-H announced the first research teams for EVIDENT, a $139M initiative focused on improving measurement and treatment development in behavioral health. None of that is as easy to write about as a big company round, but it matters because sectors become real when the funding infrastructure starts organizing around them.

A company raise tells you someone liked one asset. A fund close tells you someone thinks the category itself is worth building around. The same is true for strategic buyers, public programs, clinical infrastructure, reimbursement pathways, specialist operators, and all the boring parts of market formation that rarely make the headline but end up deciding whether a technology actually reaches patients.

So the real Q2 story was not just that bladder had a good quarter, or that BCI still pulled capital, or that sleep attracted strategic buyers. It was that neurotech looked more investable when it looked like medicine. The strongest signals sat in categories with large patient populations, clear burden, defined clinical workflows, and a plausible route to adoption.

That does not mean every company in those areas will win, or that reimbursement will be easy, or that commercial execution suddenly becomes straightforward. But it does suggest the market is rewarding practicality in a way that feels healthy.
The future-facing side of neurotech is still alive. The BCI companies are building. The soft implants are getting better. The brain-inspired AI world is pulling in huge capital. The frontier remains exciting. But Q2 also showed that the sector does not need every company to become Neuralink to matter. It needs more companies that can treat real conditions, produce evidence, get paid, and survive long enough to become part of routine care.

That is what made the quarter interesting. It was not the loudest version of neurotech. It was the more practical version. Pain, sleep, bladder, tremor, paralysis, depression, and the infrastructure underneath the sector all had meaningful moments. Q2 looked less like a market waiting for one impossible breakthrough and more like a group of companies slowly working their way into normal medicine. For neurotech, that might be the better story

About 255 million has gone into stroke recovery technology, and what struck me is that it lands at every stage rather than on one device. Vivistim went public for 150 million on a vagus nerve device for recovery. MedRhythms works on walking and gait through rhythm. BrainQ raised 50 million for an electric-field therapy aimed only at recovery. Phagenesis works on the swallowing problems that follow a stroke.

Honestly, stroke is underfunded next to how many people it disables, and it gets written about far less than the flashier brain tech. But the recovery end is finally becoming a real business rather than a research project, and that's the part that matters for actual rehab. None of it has been bought yet, so it's early, but the direction is real.

Roughly 185 million has gone into epilepsy technology recently, but it is really four different things wearing one label, and the difference matters if you're the one living with this.

There's implanted therapy that's real and cleared, like NeuroPace. There's hospital diagnostics that's real and already in hundreds of emergency rooms, like Ceribell. There's wearable monitoring that records for days at a time, like Epiminder, Epitel and NextSense. And there's seizure forecasting, like Theta, which is the one I'd be most careful about, because it's seed-stage and not a product you can get yet.

I'd rather be straight than sell anyone hope they can't act on. The monitoring and detection side is genuinely arriving. The prediction side is early and unproven. None of these companies has been acquired, which usually means the market is still being built rather than finished.

I maintain a running map of neurotech funding, and I just re-sorted it by indication instead of by technology. The cleanest signal turned out to be a single ratio: acquisition money paid out divided by money raised in.

Three indications have a real number there. Urology at 22.6x, pain at 14.5x, sleep at 3.1x. The bladder, the spine, the airway. Everything else, paralysis, memory, stroke, migraine, depression, epilepsy, is a flat zero. Big funding bars, no exits.

So the diseases generating the most investor noise are precisely the ones the market has never actually paid out on. Most of that money also arrived in just the last two years, which is probably why nothing has exited yet. There has not been time.

Check my full article in the comments

I track neurotech transactions for a market map I maintain, and I sorted the whole thing by the disease being treated rather than the technology. A few things stood out for this sub specifically.

Paralysis and communication is the single biggest money-in category, north of a billion dollars. Neuralink, Synchron, Precision, Paradromics, ABILITY, Axoft and the weird new kids on the block Subsense building a brain interface delivered through nanoparticles up the nose. Six companies, six different hardware bets and probably a long way from any acquisitions

The pattern across the whole map: the indications raising the most are the ones nobody has ever acquired. The actual exits are all in the unglamorous stuff, bladder, spine, airway. Proven gets bought, promise gets funded, and they almost never overlap.

Full artcile in the comments

Hey
I have been mapping where the money in neurotech has gone over the last couple of decades, and what stands out is that there are really two separate flows happening at once.

The new money, the venture funding, is going into the frontier. Brain-computer interfaces, portable brain imaging, focused ultrasound, foundation models for neural data. Mostly young, mostly pre-commercial, often years from a product. This is where the excitement and the big valuations are. Neuralink alone is funded at around 9 billion.

The old money, the established device companies, is buying somewhere quite different. The proven, commercial, reimbursed businesses. Nerve stimulators for the bladder, the spine, sleep apnoea. Things that already have a product and revenue and a code that pays for them.

The honest caveat is that these are not two different worlds, they are two ends of the same path. Every company that got acquired was a risky young bet once too. So the real question is which of today’s frontier technologies completes that journey, and which have been frontier for twenty years without ever getting there. Brain-computer interfaces are the obvious case of the latter.

Curious how people here see it. Which of the exciting areas right now do you think matures into something the big players buy, and which stay perpetually five years away?

I’m writing a three part series on it

I run a neurotech market-data project, and I spent the last few weeks going through every deal I could verify over the past two decades. Funding rounds, acquisitions and IPOs across more than 400 companies. I wanted to know one thing. Does the money go where the excitement is?

Brain-computer interfaces have pulled in more money than any other category, more than 2 billion dollars. Neuralink alone raised 650 million at a 9 billion valuation. And not one BCI company has ever been acquired. Not one has ever floated. Every penny that has gone in is still in there.

The money actually changes hands somewhere far less glamorous. The single most valuable technology in neurotech treats an overactive bladder. Bladder neuromodulation pulled in around 500 million and has been bought for the best part of 4 billion. Boston Scientific paid 3.7 billion for one bladder company. Spinal cord stimulators, peripheral nerve devices and sleep apnoea implants are the ones getting bought. They are finished, reimbursed businesses you can sell tomorrow.

I am not saying BCI does not get there eventually. I still believe in it. But the public and acquisition markets clearly want proof, and on BCI they are still waiting.

I write about neurotech and spent a while digging into eye tracking as a way of reading the brain. What surprised me is how much has already crossed the FDA line rather than sitting in research labs. Objective concussion testing from pupil and eye movement. Autism assessment in toddlers from gaze patterns. Portable headsets reading eye movement for early Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s signatures. The link between eye movement and neurological disease goes back to a paper in 1905. What changed is the machine learning to read it reliably outside a laboratory. Curious what people here make of where the signal is genuinely useful versus where it’s being oversold. Full write-up in the comments.

I write about neurotech and spent a while digging into eye tracking as a way of reading the brain. What surprised me is how much has already crossed the FDA line rather than sitting in research labs. Objective concussion testing from pupil and eye movement. Autism assessment in toddlers from gaze patterns. Portable headsets reading eye movement for early Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s signatures.

The link between eye movement and neurological disease goes back to a paper in 1905. What changed is the machine learning to read it reliably outside a laboratory. Curious what people here make of where the signal is genuinely useful versus where it’s being oversold. Full write-up in the comments.

Have been researching stroke recovery technology for an article and the BCI angle turned out to be more interesting than expected.

CorTec out of Germany announced something this spring that I have not seen widely discussed. Their fully implanted wireless device is being tested in an NIH-funded trial for stroke motor recovery. The same implant can also be used to let the patient control a computer with their thoughts. One device, two completely separate clinical uses. The line we usually draw between a rehab device and a BCI is getting harder to defend.

They also received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation in April, the first BCI anywhere in the world to get that designation specifically for stroke motor recovery.

A few other points in this space worth knowing:

• Kandu's IpsiHand is the only FDA-cleared BCI for stroke recovery. Non-invasive EEG cap and a brace on the affected hand. Home use. Randomised trial showed about one in two patients with meaningful benefit. Strong number by any BCI standard.

• Epia Neuro launched in April. Epidural cortical implant designed to be placed in under an hour by any neurosurgeon at any hospital. Founder is Michel Maharbiz (previously iota Biosciences, which Astellas acquired). The two-phase design (recovery first, then long-term assistive use) is structurally different from anything else in the implantable BCI space.

• Synchron, Paradromics, Blackrock and Precision Neuroscience are all primarily focused on paralysis and communication. Stroke recovery is barely on the roadmap for most of them right now.

The most commercially scalable BCI applications might end up being the rehab ones, not the high-bandwidth communication ones the headlines focus on. Curious what people here think. Is the line between rehab device and BCI a useful distinction any more, or has it always been a regulatory framing rather than a real one?

I have been researching stroke recovery technology for the past several months as part of my newsletter and recruitment business and wanted to share something for anyone here dealing with the aftermath of a stroke, or supporting someone who has had one.

The "plateau" people get told about, the idea that recovery slows down or stops after a few months, is much less of a biological fact than most patients are led to believe. The evidence increasingly says recovery can continue well beyond that window if you keep working at it. What usually runs out is the therapy schedule and the funding, not the brain's ability to keep rebuilding.

A few devices that are FDA-cleared and being used at home or in clinics right now:

• Vivistim (Mobia Medical). A small implant on the vagus nerve paired with rehab exercises. The trial showed it roughly doubled the hand and arm recovery patients got from rehab alone.

• IpsiHand (Kandu). Non-invasive. A soft cap that reads brain activity paired with a brace on the affected hand. About one in two patients in the randomised trial saw a meaningful benefit.

• FES devices (Bioness, Cionic, Neurofenix, Neuvotion). Electrical stimulation that fires the weak muscle directly while the patient does the exercise. Some are now wearable sleeves you can use at home.

• MedRhythms. Music-based rhythmic auditory stimulation for rebuilding walking. Non-invasive, home use.

• Phagenesis. For anyone who lost the ability to swallow safely after their stroke. Just added to the official 2026 American stroke guidelines.

There is more in trials and earlier stages but I am only mentioning what is currently cleared. The biggest problem in this space is not invention any more. It is access. Insurance coverage. Geographic distance from specialist centres. Clinicians who may not know these options exist. Worth asking your rehabilitation team specifically by name if any of them sound relevant.

Happy to share more detail in the comments if anyone wants it.

CorTec’s Brain Interchange system was used in a University of Washington trial where a stroke patient operated a computer and played Pong through cortical signals alone.

That’s one of several BCI developments worth paying attention to right now. Axoft closed a $55M Series A for an implantable BCI made from Fleuron, a material up to 10,000 times softer than conventional polyimide. The idea is that a softer implant causes less tissue damage and maintains signal quality over time.

A Nature study also confirmed that an ALS patient’s implanted BCI maintains stable signals overnight, opening the door to 24/7 communication for people in late-stage paralysis.

Meanwhile Motif Neurotech and MintNeuro announced a partnership combining neural sensing chips with ultra-miniaturised implant platforms for mental health applications, and Precision Neuroscience partnered with University of Chicago Medicine on AI-driven sensorimotor research.
A lot happening at once.