Brain Diseases in Its Crosshairs: NeuroXess Raises $4.2 Million in Angel Round | FreeS Fund Deal News

" Investor Perspective

Rui Ma, Vice President, FreeS Fund

Email: marui@freesvc.com

Brain disorders represent one of medicine's greatest challenges, with vast unmet medical needs. Currently, humanity lacks non-invasive brain imaging technologies that can simultaneously achieve both temporal and spatial resolution. Functional MRI's ability to precisely map brain regions at the clinical and individual level for the first time stems from the breakthrough innovation brought by Professor Hesheng Liu and his team at Harvard Medical School.

Professor Liu's globally pioneering individual-level human brain functional parcellation technology represents the fruits of exploration at the intersection of brain and cognitive science, MRI technology, signal processing, and artificial intelligence. Moreover, over the past decade, Professor Liu and his team have collaborated with renowned medical institutions in China and the US, serving more than 10,000 patients with brain disorders — including brain tumors, stroke, epilepsy, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, schizophrenia, OCD, depression, and others — to validate, iterate, and refine their methods, achieving clinical translation of the technology.

NeuroBrave, founded in 2018, was co-founded by Professor Hesheng Liu of Harvard Medical School, MIT Academician Robert Desimone, MIT Academician Guoping Feng, and entrepreneur Kecheng Wei. The company is dedicated to individual-level brain functional parcellation based on fMRI signals, providing innovative solutions for the detection, treatment, and rehabilitation of brain disorders.

In just a few short months since its founding, NeuroBrave has built a global team of scientists, clinical researchers, engineers, and designers, established offices in Boston and Beijing, and will gradually open new branches in other regions worldwide.

As China's Brain Project — with its "one body, two wings" framework (one body: fundamental research on brain cognitive principles; two wings: major brain diseases and brain-inspired artificial intelligence research) — advances toward implementation, NeuroBrave will leverage more than a decade of methodological accumulation and over ten years of clinical validation in the US to commercialize in China, where the population base of brain disorder patients is enormous. We believe NeuroBrave will make outstanding contributions to China's brain science / brain disease / brain intelligence research and commercialization, and lead the development of a hundred-billion-yuan industry.

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[Exclusive] NeuroBrave Raises $42 Million Angel Round to Accelerate R&D for Brain Disorder Technologies

Source: VB Network (动脉网)

Author: Peng Chen

On September 10, brain science company Beijing NeuroBrave Technology announced a $42 million angel round to accelerate its mission of solving brain disorders. The round was led by FreeS Fund, with participation from Mint Ventures, Tsingyuan Ventures (US), and Ray Stata (US).

Beyond Treatment,

Brain Disorders Have Become a Massive Challenge for Human Society

Brain research remains an unconquered challenge for science. As populations age, diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's have become difficult social problems to ignore. Deepening our understanding of the brain helps us comprehend these diseases and represents a key direction for scientific breakthroughs.

Data released by Alzheimer's Disease International in 2018 showed that in 2017, the global population with dementia reached 50 million — equivalent to the population of South Korea or Spain.

Roughly two-thirds were Alzheimer's patients; the remaining third included vascular dementia, mixed dementia, Lewy body dementia, and frontotemporal lobar degeneration. All of these conditions cause irreversible damage to the brain. Worldwide, someone develops dementia every three seconds.

By 2050, the global dementia population is projected to reach 152 million — equivalent to the population of Russia or Bangladesh. Globally, total costs of dementia care in 2017 were estimated at $1 trillion, expected to double to $2 trillion by 2030.

Currently, China's Alzheimer's patient population has exceeded 10 million, ranking first in the world. Without intervention, China's Alzheimer's population is projected to reach 14.1 million by 2020 and 23.3 million by 2030, imposing an economic burden of up to $114.2 billion on China.

Since 1998, the world has mounted successive assaults on Alzheimer's. A hundred drugs have been tested, yet only four have been approved for use, with limited applicability to patient populations and symptoms.

While there is currently no way to halt disease progression in late stages, evidence suggests that if detected early, Alzheimer's can be managed and controlled through medication, helping patients improve cognitive function and delay clinical progression by 10–15 years.

It is for this reason that starting in 2013, the US, EU, and Japan successively launched brain science initiatives. The EU took the lead with its 1 billion euro Human Brain Project; the US followed with a newly added $4.5 billion BRAIN Initiative. Ray Stata, US National Academy of Engineering member and founder and chairman of Analog Devices (NASDAQ: ADI), considers brain science one of the two most important frontiers for humanity in the coming century. "Advances in brain science will profoundly affect our lives and society, and even influence the evolution and development of humanity as a species," he commented. In 2016, "Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Research" was designated as a major science and technology innovation project and program in China's 13th Five-Year Plan.

Representing a Major Breakthrough in Brain Science,

NeuroBrave's Core Technology Gains Recognition

NeuroBrave is a brain science company co-founded in late 2018 by Professor Hesheng Liu of Harvard Medical School, MIT Academician Robert Desimone, MIT Academician Guoping Feng, and entrepreneur Kecheng Wei.

Based on scientific breakthroughs achieved over more than a decade of research at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging — a joint Harvard Medical School-MIT institution — NeuroBrave aims to become a world-class brain science platform company. The company hopes to leverage breakthrough brain science research and novel hardware and software technologies to help humanity deeply understand our brains and address brain disorders, a massive challenge facing human society.

By projection, NeuroBrave's market opportunity exceeds $10 billion annually in China and over $40 billion globally. Robert Desimone, NeuroBrave co-founder, member of both US national academies, and director of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, stated: "After decades of accumulation, brain science is entering an explosive period of application. A completely new hundred-billion-dollar industry based on brain science is taking shape."

Through 15 to 30 minutes of resting-state MRI scanning, NeuroBrave can precisely quantify more than 200 functional regions across an individual's entire brain (precision individual brain functional parcellation), with clinical validation demonstrating reproducible accuracy of up to 95%. This technology has been successfully applied in 46 clinical surgeries and is considered "a turning point in neuroimaging."

NeuroBrave's representative research achievements to date include 80 SCI papers published in leading neuroscience journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, JAMA Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry, PNAS, and PLoS Biology, with combined impact factors exceeding 300 and total citations surpassing 8,000.

In just a few months since its founding, NeuroBrave has assembled a global team of scientists, clinical researchers, engineers, and designers, established offices in Boston and Beijing, and will gradually open new branches in other regions worldwide. In May 2019, NeuroBrave participated in the second "Startup Beijing" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, winning first prize among over 1,000 competing teams in the three-month contest.

Professor Hesheng Liu, NeuroBrave's founder, believes that neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, psychiatric disorders such as depression, and developmental conditions such as childhood autism all represent massive challenges for society. Despite decades of effort to solve these problems, most attempts have unfortunately failed. He believes NeuroBrave will forge a new path to addressing them: "We are making excellent progress, and our first product will be launched very soon."

NeuroBrave's technology has received strong recognition from investors. They all agree that brain disorders represent a massive challenge for humanity. Nearly all human brain disorders lack effective diagnostic and treatment methods, with little progress made over many years. With over 1 billion brain disease patients globally, the medical field is essentially at a loss. It is precisely for this reason that this represents an enormous opportunity.

"The NeuroBrave team, through more than a decade of effort, has achieved scientific breakthroughs, and their technology has already achieved major clinical success, which will help address this massive challenge," said Feng Li, founding partner of FreeS Fund, expressing strong confidence in NeuroBrave.