Milestones

NADA Milestones to Prepare for the Series A Raise

As of March 2025, NADA has completed the six initial milestones we designed to warrant a Series A raise of $20M on a $100M pre-money valuation.

The first milestone was a scientific analysis of the feasibility of a Personal Neuromorphic Emulation, now published in the journal Entropy (Tucker & Luu, 2024). For initial comments on this analysis, see the Theoretical Neurobiology Seminar (June, 3, 2024).

The second milestone was building a next generation Whole Brain Computer Interface (WBCI), a 280-channel high definition EEG system supported by individual head modeling for precise localization of neural activity to an individual’s cortical surface. This system is now complete and sold to research laboratories by NADA’s parent R&D company BEL (bel.company).

- The 280-channel Geodesic Head Web. This is the fifth generation of the geodesic electrode system, now in use (in various channel counts) in over 1000 laboratories worldwide. This latest design includes a novel modular pentagonal element that is specifically prepared for integrating microelectronics on the head (US Patent No. 11,045,131).

- Low evaporation sponge & electrolyte design. This latest generation includes the capability for recording all-night (8-hour) HD-EEG, an essential requirement for capturing the individual’s unique sleep neurophysiology.

- Low-noise wireless 280-channel amplifier integrated with NVIDIA machine learning. On-board AI classification and decision support is essential for both advanced EEG acquisition and transcranial electrical stimulation. The lightweight battery operation and wireless design allow use at the bedside or in a backpack.

- Software for HD-EEG acquisition: the BELView software allows real-time monitoring of the HD-EEG signals as well as interface with experiment control.

The third milestone was a complete individual head modeling system to characterize a person’s brain and head anatomy, to allow high resolution computational modeling of the electrical fields of the brain, as recorded noninvasively at the head surface with HD-EEG (Li et al., 2016)(US Pat. no. 8,478,011, licensed from the University of Oregon). The same system allows high-res modeling of Transcranial Electrical Stimulation (TES) to modulate cortical activity with external fields (Fernandez-Corazza, Turovets, Luu, Anderson, & Tucker, 2016; Fernandez-Corazza et al., 2018; Hathaway et al., 2021). The key elements of this head modeling platform, SOURCERER®.

- Registration of the 280 electrodes with the individual’s head surface.

- Automated segmentation of seven tissue types of varying conductivity (scalp, skull, cerebrospinal fluid, gray matter, white matter, eyeballs, air) from the person’s structural (T1w) MRI.

- Automated cortical surface extraction and tessellation into surface patches (2400, 4800, or 9600 patches) using the marching cubes algorithm. Computation of the surface normal of each patch, and placement of an equivalent electrical dipole model at the normal position.

- Construction of an efficient, proprietary finite element electromagnetic modeling framework (HexaFEM) for precise computation of both EEG and TES fields (Fernandez-Corazza, Turovets, & C., 2019; Fernandez-Corazza et al., 2018).

- Registration of the individual’s head model with other neuroimaging data, including functional MRI (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and diffusion-weighted fiber tractography (Li et al., 2016; Papademetris et al., 2006).

The accuracy of SOURCERER’s localization of HD-EEG fields to the cortical surface was tested by comparing its localization of epileptiform events to the patient’s cortical surface to the neurosurgeon’s localization of the tissue resection that eliminated the epileptiform activity (Fernandez-Corazza et al., 2021). SOURCERER® was cleared by the US FDA for use in neurosurgical planning in November 2024.

The fourth milestone was completion of an invasive electrode registration with SOURCERER® to allow integration between NADA’s noninvasive Whole Brain Computer Interface and various invasive BCIs under development by Neuralink, Paradromics, and others. Because brain function, like that of AI networks, involves distributed representations, whole brain measurement and stimulation gives noninvasive technology important advantages over invasive technologies. Nonetheless, important advances are being made with invasive methods, and the ability to precisely register both noninvasive and invasive technologies will be important for optimizing future progress. In October 2021, NADA’s Chief Science Officer, Phan Luu, and consulting scientist Xenaphon Papademetris of Yale were awarded a $1.3M grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to develop an intracranial registration technology to integrate with the Sourcerer workflow. This technology is now complete and has been validated in neurological and neurosurgical practice for analyzing both invasive intracranial recordings with noninvasive HD-EEG in the same user interface. With this validation and the recent 510K FDA clearance of SOURCERER®, we will verify with the FDA that we can clear this intracranial extension with an internal letter to file.

The fifth milestone was the completion and validation of a first-generation AI for automated EEG and HD-EEG classification. This is a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) AI that allows various classifications to be trained either with individual or with group data. The first training was for the task of all night sleep stage scoring for our Neurosom® sleep assessment and therapy products, the Neurosom EEG Analysis Technology (NEAT). The validation contrasted NEAT scoring compared with three commercial sleep scoring services; NEAT scoring was as reliable as the reliability computed between any of the commercial services. With these results, NEAT was submitted for 510k clearance in January, 2025.

The sixth milestone was the creation of an interactive and collaborative marketplace for modular Whole Brain Computer Interface technologies. Although NADA is building proprietary technologies for each module required for an effective Personal Neuromorphic Emulation, in order to make rapid progress, we need to facilitate collaboration between open source technologies, such as the European Virtual Brain project, and various privately developed technologies. Particularly challenging will be the Neuromorphic Emulation Constructor AI (NECA), where multiple AI modules for emulating brain architecture and function of specific systems and regions must be integrated to create an effective PNE.

We have created an innovative software platform, the Forward Looking Operations Workflow (FLOW), that allows large scale acquisition and storage of HD-EEG data, a full pipeline for processing MRI and other neuroimaging data registered to the individual brain. FLOW has been fully tested for cybersecurity and for compatibility with standard HD-EEG and neuroimaging file formats, and it is now in use by multiple HD-EEG laboratories for data management and processing.

From Breakthroughs to Buildout: NADA’s Milestones

Our journey blends deep neuroscience with cutting-edge AI, backed by SBIR grants, FDA-clearance pathways, and proprietary technology. These milestones mark our progress toward building the world’s first functional, whole-brain interface—and position NADA for accelerated growth as we approach Series A.