Notes from a Spreadsheet

What I did with my weekend, and why I need to get out more

On Friday I posted the first part of a series I’m writing about money in neurotech (Part 1: The Technologies). I don’t mean to brag, but it has been really frustrating pulling all this together. The goal is to build a complete list of every transaction in the sector and then run some proper analysis on it. Even since Friday I’ve realised I missed a few things, and I’ll probably keep finding gaps for weeks as this seems to be a never ending task of data enrichment as my Saturday afternoon found out. But the end product, which will hopefully be a ridiculous piece of market intelligence (emphasis very much on the word hopefully) should be worth it.

So far I’ve tracked and verified hundreds of transactions, every funding round, acquisition and listing I could stand behind. By the end I had a single register of where the money in neurotech has actually gone and it tells an interesting story. Probably not a huge surprise those of you in the know, but I’m not so here’s my thoughts.

The story the field tells about itself is a boom. New companies, bigger rounds, brain interfaces on magazine covers. The story the register tells is quieter and a lot more unsettling. The money is not spread across the field. It is pooled at the top, and most companies are nowhere near the pool.

Here are the numbers that did it. There is around 13.9 billion dollars of disclosed venture capital sitting in 431 companies. Sounds like a thriving market until you rank it. A small group at the top holds almost half of it, and the same handful of names keep showing up. The typical company in the middle raised about 8 million, while the average round sits at 32 million, and that gap between the middle and the average is the story in two numbers. A handful of giant raises drag the average way up, and most companies are raising small, quiet rounds a long way from the headlines.

The other thing the transaction register shows is that it is largely the same investors going into the same companies. A name turns up in one round and then again in the next, backing the companies that already look like winners. I understand why. But there is only so much money to go around, and when it keeps flowing to the same short list, everyone else is competing for what is left, which is not much.

And here is the part that I see and hear everyday in my meetings for my actual job. Some of the best technology and science I came across is not in that pool at all. It is being kept alive by grants. Non-dilutive money, NIH prizes, government programmes, the kind of funding that does not show up on magazine covers or interview headlines. Genuinely serious work, surviving on the patience of a research grant rather than the enthusiasm of a venture fund. That tells you something uncomfortable about what the market actually rewards, and it is not always the science.

This is also a big part of why more and more companies are launching consumer brands now. For some it is a way to keep the lights on while they wait on an FDA decision, a bit of revenue and attention while the bureaucracy does its thing. For others there is no clinical play at all, they are straight up longevity devices aimed at people who want to optimise rather than treat anything. The wearable brain monitoring sector is probably where this tips over this year, EEG and an app, the Oura ring for the brain as I have so tediously kept calling it. What the general public outside our little bubble knows about neurotech is about to change quite a lot, and it will not be the implant in the skull that does it. It will be the headband on the bedside table, or the headphones with an EEG reader built in, or the little patch behind your ear or on your temple, or some other form factor I have not come across yet. Actually, has anyone seen my beanie?

I once read a stat that said 90 percent of startups don’t make it. I have no idea if that’s true, but I think about it an unhealthy amount while doing my job. Because the thing the spreadsheet does not capture is the people. There are so many genuinely brilliant people in this field, from old school neuromod sales reps who have been doing this for twenty years to the recent grads building foundational models for a startup in stealth that nobody has heard of yet. People give a real shit about what they are doing here. It is not just about the money. And the register is full of rows where the work was good and the people were serious and the company still ran out of road, because the money pooled somewhere else.

I do not want this to read as doom, because it is not the whole picture. There is also a lot of new money arriving, and I am genuinely not sure yet what to make of it. Some of it is billionaire cash, well funded passion projects from people who can afford to be patient. Some of it looks like a bet that neurotech, neuroAI and brain foundational models are a route to something much bigger than medicine. And some of it, if I’m honest, feels like investors piling into the gap Musk’s attention left behind, FOMO and hype doing what they always do.

And money follows attention, it always has. Stick .ai on the end of your url and a certain kind of investor sits up. I suspect we are not far off the same thing happening in neuro. A .bci here, a .eeg there, founders reaching for whatever suffix signals they are building the future. Half of me finds it a bit silly. The other half has been around long enough to know it works.

So this is really a thank you to the quiet ones. The companies that never make the cover, doing serious work on small money or a grant, competing for whatever is left after the same few names have had their fill. i hope to see you in the 10% (I hope I am too).