An Inventor of Apple's FaceID Wants to Analyze Your Brain's Health With AI
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Gidi Littwin co-founded Hemispheric after leaving Apple in 2020, bringing deep learning expertise from developing FaceID and Vision Pro to build AI models for brain health analysis.
- Hemispheric raised $52 million in funding from U.S. and Israeli venture capital firms and individual investors, including early Uber-backer Howard Morgan, to advance its AI-driven brain diagnostics.
- Hemispheric collected 250,000 hours of brain data from 100,000 paid volunteers across Asia, Tel Aviv, and Boston to train a frontier AI model that interprets electrical brain activity like large language models process text.
- Hemispheric’s AI model was tested on individuals with PTSD, schizophrenia, and depression, with the team reporting accurate deductions about brain health and now working on a clinical study for Alzheimer’s prediction.
- Hemispheric will submit its first product, aimed at studying PTSD, to the FDA for approval in early 2025 and aims for public rollout by 2027, positioning it as a low-cost diagnostic tool akin to a blood test.
- Gidi Littwin and co-founder Hagai Lalazar are developing proprietary brain scanners optimized for deep learning, arguing that traditional EEG devices were not built with machine learning in mind.
Why it matters: Hemispheric’s $52 million raise and extensive brain dataset position it as a serious contender in AI-driven mental health diagnostics, offering clinicians a tool to objectively diagnose conditions like PTSD and Alzheimer’s—potentially reducing reliance on subjective assessments and accelerating treatment decisions across clinics and hospitals.
