Synaptrix - Thinking the Future into Existence
We at Underdog Labs are TRUE early stage investors. We are a sector agnostic venture capital firm that backs entrepreneurs with unique and piercing views of the future who will stop at nothing to build generational companies that solve the problems they embark to fix. While we typically engage with startups in a formal pre-seed round, the spirit of our strategy is to find n=1 talent as early as possible: pre-product, pre-traction, pre-idea - all included in our sweet spot.
The world of investing at this pre-seed stage seems strange because, truthfully, it is! Technology iterates exceptionally quickly these days. Markets shift. Pivots are the norm and expected. Sustainable moats are harder and harder to distinguish. How can serious, thoughtful, professional investors justify writing checks into companies that lack a track record of substance to diligence? What brings confidence that the opportunity we assess today will ultimately emerge as an industry-disrupting force that yields power-law returns for our LPs?
There are, of course, table-stakes characteristics of each business that are identifiable early on that we require to be true: massive market, founder/problem fit, a focused and winnable chapter 1 go-to-market motion, etc. However, the beating heart of finding conviction at this stage is we invest in founders rather than companies. This is the art, not the science, of early stage investing. We qualitatively assess founding teams for attributes we believe signal the highest likelihood that this team will win.
Three words that anchor our thought process these days are: Agency, Urgency, and Ambition.
Aryan Govil and Eric Yao at Synaptrix reflect these qualities in droves. As they prepare to rapidly scale Synaptrix, we are thrilled to be their partners, and strongly encourage later stage investors to take a serious look at this opportunity. These two technologists are an incredible example of the vision we look for in founders, and we believe they will bring about a future where all of humanity benefits from fully unlocked non-invasive brain-computer interfaces.
Synaptrix Labs
Synaptrix is building a vertically integrated non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) platform, combining high-density EEG hardware, large-scale neural datasets, and AI models designed to decode brain signals with much greater fidelity than traditional EEG systems. Their goal is to achieve implant-like BCI capabilities without surgery, initially enabling applications such as computer control, wheelchair navigation, communication, and prosthetic control for people with severe disabilities.
Humanity has had access to external EEG hardware and signaling for over 100 years. The issue is the electrical signal that emerges around our heads is VERY noisy because it needs to traverse layers of soft and hard tissue. Additionally, electrical signals from all the muscles on our heads are also picked up, further clouding the information and making it difficult to leverage that signal for real-world applications. To get a cleaner signal directly from the brain, we can implant directly into brain tissue, but that introduces serious safety concerns for patients and whomever else opts for that procedure. With modern AI/ML, the messy signal we harvest externally can be cleaned efficiently and accurately. Intent can be extracted. The power of this technology is what Aryan and Eric are unlocking.
For further reading, Synaptrix’s Seed investors, Delphi Ventures, wrote an exceptional overview of the technology and opportunity.
Quality 1: Agency
Does a founder just figure things out?
Is a founder scrappy enough to make progress in a resource constrained environment? Can they make sense of a complicated technology landscape or a layered customer acquisition process?
When we first met the Synaptrix team, they were fresh out of undergrad and evangelizing the notion that “everybody should be able to control everything with just their brains”. Mind-blowing aspiration.
It became evident very quickly this team wasn’t mindlessly spewing phrases they thought would sound catchy to investors. They were, and are, serious operators and technologists. With their first application in wheelchair control for people with severe paralysis, we pressured them on all the complications related to building, and ultimately selling, this technology. Every question we thought would trip up these founders and reveal naivete was thoughtfully answered. They could walk us through the FDA pathway, commercialization through physicians and physician groups, reimbursement, manufacturing, and how the product would ultimately get into patients' hands. Frankly, they understood the nuance of building and selling a medical device better than plenty of people we've met who have spent their entire careers in the industry, and notably, had built a working prototype with very limited resources.
Aryan and Eric have continued to run Synaptrix with this elemental scrappy founder mentality. Furthermore, they’ve proven themselves as very responsible stewards of capital who deftly resolve the random problems of the day. Some anecdotes include:
- As an AI company, never spending money on compute, but rather accumulating hundreds of thousands of cloud credits by directly reaching out to researchers and cloud providers.
- Moving the team into a compact Manhattan office filled with Facebook marketplace furniture.
- When massive import bills jeopardized shipping their circuit board located in Hong Kong, they simply flew directly to Hong Kong, “taxied through the jungle to the manufacturing plant”, brought it back, and saved tens of thousands of dollars.
- To prepare for initial FDA talks, they (correctly) assumed that developing personal relationships with reviewers would speed up the process and yield faster responses. So they flew to Washington DC, found the bar where the stakeholders hung out, and willed these connections into existence.
Quality 2: Urgency
The time is now. Does a founder fearlessly charge ahead?
In the early chapters, progress looks differently for different companies. Synaptrix is building truly novel, frontier technology. Aryan and Eric have been disciplined with not mistaking busyness, with progress.
While mocked in the beginning that “denoising EEG is impossible”, Aryan and Eric decided to establish a culture willing to make big bets - so long as this experimentation is grounded in first-principles thinking. At Synaptrix their thesis remains that motor intention can be extracted through EEG signals, not just through implants, but rather, non-invasively. It wasn’t perfectly clear if, or how well, this would work in the beginning. Previously, the largest dataset for their type of research had just(!) 70 participants. This is not a big enough dataset to know for certain whether they could build a generalized BCI foundation model that will underpin the future of human-machine interactions. As a result, they’d need to build their own data set, and a large one at that, for their training needs.
“Eat the elephant one bite at a time”, “Only one way to find out”, “Nothing to it but to do it”, whatever the preferred metaphor, is how Synaptrix operates. Heads down and myopically focused on the ultimate goal.
Their relatively modest amount of early funding has been directed into hiring elite technical talent and turning the charming, but tiny, NYC office into a revolving door of brain study participants. They’ve amassed, by far, the largest dataset in this research category to date. Post-Series A, they’ll kick off a massive study collection operation to further increase this dataset size by orders of magnitude.
With this proprietary data they’ve driven a wheelchair across a busy Manhattan street with only thinking forward-backward-left-right. And they can now control a computer cursor (and type!) with, you guessed, just thoughts.
It’s awesome, and it’s real progress.
Quality 3: Ambition
Missionaries not Mercenaries.
The ambition oozing out of the Synaptrix team is contagious and intoxicating. They aspire to be THE control layer for brain-computer interactions. To achieve this they have a “50 year roadmap” for the company. To quote Aryan “BCI is a tech tree that will grow for the next 100 years, Synaptrix is the start”.
Use your imagination: what could we accomplish in our lives, or any industry, if we can control physical, and digital, use-cases with our thoughts? Aryan and Eric are building Synaptrix to find out. It’s a crazy opportunity to underwrite because it potentially represents a step-change in what the standard method of interacting with technology is. Every industry has a killer use-case for BCI, and wheelchair control is the first of many applications to leverage this technology.
Join the Neuro Revolution
Synaptrix presents a unique opportunity to charge fearlessly into a future where the full power of our physiology is leveraged for improved quality of life, health outcomes, and super-charged human potential. Aryan and Eric believe this future is inevitable and they’re the ones to make it happen. We agree and see Synaptrix as an Underdog quickly turning into a Favorite.
