Mapping The Human Brain: BrainSightAI’s Bid To Rewrite The Neuroscience Playbook

The man who brought light to the world was thrown into darkness as a child because his school found him mentally disturbed. As Thomas Alva Edison grew up to be a scientist, came his sharp satire: “The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.”

Little did he know that what he called ‘function’ would change to a ‘pain’ in about 150 years, with mental health disorders vitiating more than 14% of the 8 Bn lives on this planet. 

In India, home to the world’s largest population, at least 15% of adults are in need of active interventions for various mental health issues like mood disorders, bipolarity, anxiety, schizophrenia and different psychotic problems.

When human minds are playing up, turn to artificial intelligence. Ask AI what’s making us mentally ill, and the one-word answer comes: Unpredictability. It is unpredictability that leaves us strained, irreverent of demography, geography, and socio-economic status. From mental health concerns to serious neurological illnesses, scientists have tried to study the human brain for centuries, but this is one of the biggest enigmas in the human body and healthcare value chain.  

Can AI help us understand the human brain better? Can a more scientific approach pave the way for people to comprehend the disorders and seek medical intervention? When Laina Emmanuel and Rimjhim Agrawal couldn’t find an answer to questions like these, they turned to AI. 

A shared belief that the problems with mental health and more serious neurological disorders need to be addressed with better technology brought the duo together in 2019. “It’s been six years since BrainSightAI is advancing the process of brain mapping with its software, helping doctors to read human brains better and bring advancement in neurology and psychiatry,”  Emmanuel told Inc42. 

The startup developed its first product VoxelBox, powered by traditional AI and generative AI models, to help doctors across 40 hospitals in India read the structural and functional connectivity of human brains to modernise the treatments for brain tumours, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other neurological and neurodegenerative diseases.

BrainSight’s VoxelBox is yet to find a steady product market fit within large hospitals and the neurological care ecosystem, but the startup aims to eventually take this product to the masses to help detect early signs of dementia, psychosis, bipolarity as well as other neurological and neurodegenerative problems.

The AI-powered brain mapping tech seems to be a no-brainer for an underserved market like India 

The Journey Matters, Not The Destination

BrainSight AI has its brains seamlessly complementing each other with Agrawal being a doctorate from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) and researching on the use of brain mapping in psychiatry, particularly in the areas of schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), bipolarity, and major depression, and Emmanuel coming from a core technical and business background with some years spent in public health and international development.

The healthcare AI startup attained a major milestone last year when it received the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) certification. With that, the startup is now set to lead India’s rise in modern psychiatry and neuroscience.

Psychiatry was the core focus when BrainSight AI took off, but the founders soon got a reality check that psychiatrists and neurological doctors in India were not yet ready for such advanced technology, where brain mapping or connectomics can be adopted as a method to diagnose or treat serious neurological issues.

They rejigged their strategy and worked on every idea from scratch when they understood that it was neurosurgeons who could be immediate takers of the technology they were building. “It was almost like doing a PhD all over again,” said Emmanuel, the chief executive.

 

While Agarwal had to look beyond the connectivity patterns of the brain for lesions, Emmanuel had to figure out the product market fit for a new area and the regulatory requirements in it. “It wasn’t an easy task either,” she said. “Connectomics is a new field of knowledge, which has been built over the past 10-12 years. Connectomic analysis for medical purposes is virtually unknown.” 

She said that only a handful of top-rated facilities like Stanford Health Care and Harvard Medical School have neuroscience, machine learning, and AI teams working together in psychological and clinical research areas, using connectomic analysis in medical practices.

Being a pioneer in the Indian market, BrainSight AI had to gather all the knowledge in neuroscience and then translate it into languages that the doctors could understand. Through the last five years, the company built that technology and worked on generating demand in the market.

“We had to sit down with the clinicians and doctors and explain to them that they could use it in, say, Parkinson’s or epilepsy, and summarise tens and hundreds of research papers on such applications,” Emmanuel said.

It is now working with 40 hospitals, 30 of them have been converted to paid contracts, including Max Healthcare, Sparsh Hospital, and Tata Memorial Centre.

The startup began generating revenue in 2025. The hospitals share the advanced MRIs of their patients with BrainSight AI, which then analyses and does the computational neuroscience work using its software, and sends the results back to the hospitals.

The startup is also carrying out clinical studies through BIRAC, at Max Hospital, and St John’s in Bengaluru.

Looking For Knots In Neural Circuits

Brain mapping is the study of the anatomy and function of the brain and spinal cord with the use of imaging, biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics, stem cell and cellular biology, aided by engineering, neurophysiology and nanotechnology. 

“It’s a highly complicated set of 40-50 steps,” explained the CEO, claiming that BrainSight AI has been able to streamline all of these processes using AI.

In brain mapping, it starts with acquiring the image of the brain, which includes multiple processes such as skull stripping, analysing the inside part of the brain, processing the images amid various ambient noises, and so on. It is, however, impractical to study 42 Bn neurons in the brain, and that’s why clinicians create a graph of the brain.

“In a graph, we have to see which networks lighted up together and if that is related to the language network, attention network, sensory-motor network, and so on. And you can characterise the different parts of the graph,” she said.

But this much is only for neurosurgeons. In neurology and psychiatry, there is a much broader scope where the brain graphs of 100 people with chances of dementia can be tallied to figure out patterns that can indicate early signs of the disease or any other mental morbidity.

“By the time you come to this point, you’ve essentially come up with a lot of numbers, which now need to be translated into 3D visualisation. Our medical device helps with all of it.”

Many existing machine learning models, such as TensorFlow, are used in the process of skull stripping. BrainSight AI has also developed its own models and keeps training them based on the new datasets it receives from hospitals. In building the brain graphs, too, the startup used many ML models, and when comparing two graphs, it uses principal component analysis. 

To make it more easily explainable to doctors, in addition to 3D visualisation, the startup is working on its AI chatbots and agents. “We are building AI agents, which are trained on some of our proprietary data on connectomics and its implications, concerning the Indian patients only,” Emmanuel said.

Drawing Up The RoadMap For Scaling 

The scope for BrainSight’s VoxelBox is huge, especially as India’s neurosurgery market is likely to average a 24.91% growth rate to reach $429.45 Mn by 2032.

But the journey has merely begun, and the company is likely to encounter harder challenges as it tries to scale and expand. As of now, the hospitals and their doctors are prescribing connectomics to brain surgery patients, which comes to BrainSight as business. These patients shell out around INR 30,000 per report. The startup works in a pay-per-use model with the hospitals.

Going forward, the startup aims to become completely subscription-based and also tap MRI machine makers like GE and Siemens to expand its offerings.

There are, however, some inherent concerns in the segment it works in such as gaining trust, especially from patients, and getting them to pay for sophisticated diagnostic procedures that BrainSight offers. This could be a bigger challenge beyond Tier I cities. 

Emmanuel, though, shrugged off such worries, saying that these areas have been dealt with. “I think the next set of challenges is incoming, as we scale from a small group of close-knit scientists, technicians, and MRI specialists to building a commercial organisation… It’ll be about figuring out the revenue operations, sales targets, and sales incentives.” 

The medical devices market is also highly regulated and led by distributors. “We need to know how to deal with all of this as we also scale across the world.” 

In fact, the company is also preparing for submissions to receive an FDA certification, as it aims to get access to the US and allied markets. It secured $5 Mn (around INR 43 Cr) earlier this year in its pre-series A funding round, led by IAN Alpha Fund, with participation from IvyCap Ventures, Silver Needle, and other existing investors, to pursue its India and global expansion plans.

Even as BrainSight plans to enter 100 hospitals in India this year and has found its product market fit, which is scalable despite the challenges, one question keeps gnawing at it: Can VoxelBox bring in a transformation in psychiatry and mental disorder treatments?

Although the market opportunity is big with fewer competitors like Omniscient Neurotechnology, InMed AI, and NeuroLeap, which are directly or partially targeting the same areas as BrainSight, the scope for all these companies to scale in psychiatry will take a few more years.

If BrainSight AI succeeds in creating a space in clinical psychiatry and psychological diagnostics – a vision both founders have long pursued – it could mark a pivotal shift not just for the company, but for India’s broader approach to the pressing issue of mental health and wellbeing.

[Edited By Kumar Chatterjee]