(Vmeetsolutions) — LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman is leading a $12 million funding round for
Sanmai Technologies
and joining the board of the startup, which aims to use ultrasound technology and artificial intelligence to improve human health.
Hoffman’s investment is part of an explosion of interest by tech billionaires in funding the frontiers of brain science. Earlier this year, Coinbase Inc. co-founder Fred Ehrsam unveiled a company building a take-home ultrasound helmet to treat diseases and aid wellbeing. And for years, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has been leading Neuralink, which aims to create brain implants that would eventually give people superhuman powers.
Jay Sanguinetti
, Sanmai’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said that his goal is to build a device that would cost less than $500, which people could use at home to treat diseases and also improve their cognitive abilities. He sees the technology as a paradigm shift in how clinicians would approach mental health.
Today, treatments for mental health conditions often include medications, which have broad effects on the brain and can cause many side effects. Ultrasound, by comparison, focuses on very small regions of the brain associated with specific mental conditions or cognitive states. Early research has shown promise for conditions such as
anxiety
,
depression
,
pain
,
epilepsy
and
tremors
, but scientists say there are still many questions that must be answered before devices are ready for take-home use.
‘Very Cool’
Sanmai’s approach is to pair the ultrasound technology with an AI-powered companion bot to help guide the treatment and understand what’s most effective. That caught the attention of Hoffman, who has recently founded several AI-related companies and was impressed at how Sanguinetti has used AI to solve technical challenges like skull distortion to bring the device to the field.
“I thought it was very cool that it gives you a new instrument for dealing with a whole wide variety of brain things which are otherwise very difficult to deal with,” Hoffman, 57, said in an interview. “Your tool set for dealing with things that are going wrong in the brain is very limited.”
Hoffman, who is worth $3.6 billion, according to the VmeetsolutionsBillionaires Index, made the investment through his Aphorism Foundation, which also holds his stake in OpenAI.
Sanguinetti, 41, a University of Arizona researcher, has been studying the impact of ultrasound technology on mental health for more than a decade. He started Sanmai in 2020 and previously raised funding from investors including
PsyMed Ventures
and SpaceX director Steve Jurvetson’s Future Ventures.
Some billionaires are backing more invasive brain technologies that require surgically implanting a device. Musk’s Neuralink, which has raised
$1.3 billion
and recently reached a $9 billion valuation, has embedded devices in five humans. Other billionaires including Amazon.com Inc. co-founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Citadel founder Ken Griffin have all recently backed similar brain-related startups.
Clinical Trial
Sanmai’s device would be worn outside the head and concentrate a beam of ultrasound energy at a specific spot in the brain, massaging the tissue and potentially altering the organ’s activity, a technique called low-intensity focused ultrasound. At least 20 companies are currently working in the field, according to the Focused Ultrasound Foundation.
“Non-invasive is a much less risky approach for a significant benefit,” Hoffman said. “The risk and difficulties in invasive strike me as very difficult to navigate and will take years, decades maybe.”
Operating in stealth the last few years, the eight-person company has been in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration and will soon be starting a clinical trial to get its tool approved, Sanguinetti said. An early prototype device is already in trials for generalized anxiety disorder at a clinic in Sunnyvale, California, where Sanmai is based.
Sanguinetti is building on the decade-plus research he’s done in the field, after starting out as a graduate student witnessing the effects of brain stimulation on Parkinson’s disease patients.
“I saw every patient’s life changed, but I got kind of bit by the bug of like, ‘How do you do this but non-invasively and at scale?’” Sanguinetti said.
There are still many technological challenges to get to a home-use device, including the need for each patient to first get an MRI and fine-tuning the ultrasound levels to suit the individual.
“The way to do this safely and at scale is to first go through the clinics,” Sanguinetti said, “then leverage that data to go out to the consumer.”
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