The Apple FaceID Co-Inventor Building a Frontier AI Model for the Human Brain
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- Hemispheric raised $52 million in early-stage funding from American and Israeli VCs plus early Uber backer Howard Morgan, using the capital to pursue FDA approval, US hiring, and government and pharma partnerships.
- Gidi Littwin, co-inventor of Apple's FaceID and a former Vision Pro hand-tracking engineer who left Apple in 2020, co-founded Hemispheric after co-founder Hagai Lalazar cold-messaged him on LinkedIn; Lalazar had already interviewed 75 candidates.
- Hemispheric's frontier model was trained on 250,000 hours of brain data from 100,000 paid volunteers across Asia, Tel Aviv, and Boston, and was tested on people diagnosed with PTSD, schizophrenia, and depression.
- Hemispheric is currently running a clinical study to test whether its model can diagnose and predict Alzheimer's, after which it plans to scale brain data collection to millions of people.
- Hemispheric's first product — a PTSD diagnostic that uses a lightweight EEG headset and a 15-minute tablet app session — will be submitted to the FDA for approval early next year, with a public rollout targeted for later in 2027.
- Hemispheric is building its own brain scanners, with Littwin arguing traditional EEG devices "were never built for machine learning and definitely not deep learning."
Why it matters: If Hemispheric's model holds up in clinical trials, diagnosing conditions like PTSD and Alzheimer's could shift from subjective questionnaires to a 15-minute EEG readout available in mental health clinics and even psychologists' offices — with the company's first product potentially reaching the public in late 2027.
