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Array of Precision Neuroscience

Source: Precision Neuroscience

It happened so fast that Craig Mermel missed it. 

He was standing in a busy operating room in West Virginia, waiting for a surgeon to place Precision Neuroscience’s neural implant system onto a conscious patient’s brain for the first time. Mermel, the president and chief product officer at Precision, said he looked away for a moment, and by the time he turned back, the company’s paper-thin electrode array was in position. 

In seconds, a real-time, high-resolution rendering of the patient’s brain activity washed over a screen. According to Precision, the system had provided the highest resolution picture of human thought ever recorded. 

“It was incredibly surreal,” Mermel said in an interview with CNBC. “The nature of the data and our ability to visualize that, you know, I got… chills.”

The procedure Mermel observed was the company’s first-ever in-human clinical study.

Founded in 2021 by a co-founder of Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface startup, Precision Neuroscience is an industry competitor working to help patients with paralysis operate digital devices by decoding their neural signals. A BCI is a system that deciphers brain signals and translates them into commands for external technologies, and several companies like Synchron, Paradromics and Blackrock Neurotech have also created devices with this capability. Precision announced a $41 million Series B funding round in January.

The company’s flagship BCI system, the Layer 7 Cortical Interface, is an electrode array resembling a piece of scotch tape. Since it’s thinner than a human hair, Precision says it can conform to the brain’s surface without damaging any tissue, and in the study, Precision’s system was temporarily placed onto the brains of three patients who were already undergoing neurosurgery to have tumors removed. 

Since the technology worked as expected, future studies will explore further applications in clinical and behavioral contexts, Mermel said. If the trials go according to Precision’s plan, patients with severe degenerative diseases like ALS could eventually regain some ability to communicate with loved ones by moving cursors, typing and even accessing social media with their minds.

Although an in-human study is a major milestone, the road to market for this type of technology is a long one. Precision has not yet received FDA approval for its device, and the company will have to work closely with regulators to successfully conduct several extremely thorough rounds of testing and data safety collection.

As of June, no BCI company has managed to clinch the FDA’s final seal of approval.

“The goal is to deliver a device that can help people living with permanent disability, so this is like the first step,” Mermel said. “Now the real work begins.”

Doctors prepare Precision’s system. Precision’s array compared to a penny.

Photo: Anna von Scheling

A number of different academic medical centers offered to support the company’s pilot clinical study, according to Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, co-founder and chief science officer at Precision. The company partnered with West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, and the two organizations prepared for the procedures for more than a year in advance, Rapoport said.

Rapoport, who has been working on BCI technology for more than 20 years, said seeing Precision’s technology on the brain of a human patient for the first time was an “incredibly gratifying” milestone.

“I can’t really describe emotionally what that’s like,” he said. “It was tremendous.”

Dr. Peter Konrad, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, was the surgeon who physically placed Precision’s system onto the patients’ brains during their procedures.

Konrad said it was a simple process that felt like laying a piece of tissue paper on the brain. 

Patients had Precision’s system on their brains for 15 minutes. One of them remained asleep during the procedure, but two patients were woken up so the Layer 7 could capture their brain activity as they spoke. 

“I’ve never seen that amount of data, 1,000 channels in real-time, of electrical activity, just washing over the brain as somebody was talking,” Konrad said in an interview with CNBC. “It was literally like you’re watching somebody think. It’s pretty amazing.”

Electrodes are already used in practice to help neurosurgeons monitor brain activity during a procedure, but the resolution provided by conventional systems is low. Konrad said standard electrodes are about four millimeters big, while Precision’s array can put 500 to 1,000 contacts on that size.   

“It’s the difference between looking at the world with an old black and white camera versus seeing in hi-def,” he said.

Konrad said it is too early for the patients in this study to see the direct benefits of this technology.

Precision’s array compared to a penny.

Photo: Anna von Scheling

Precision ultimately hopes its technology will not require open brain surgery at all. In an interview with CNBC in January, co-founder and CEO Michael Mager said a surgeon should be able to implant the array by making a thin slit in the skull and sliding in the device like a letter into a letter box. The slit would be less than a millimeter thick – so small that patients don’t need their hair shaved for the procedure. 

Precision’s minimally invasive approach is intentional, as competing BCI companies like Paradromics and Neuralink have designed systems meant to be inserted directly into the brain tissue. 

Rapoport said that inserting a BCI into the brain would provide a clear picture of what each neuron is doing, but it risks damaging the tissue and is difficult to scale. He said that level of detail is not necessary to decode speech or achieve the other functions Precision is striving for, so it was a tradeoff the company was ultimately willing to make.  

In the coming weeks, Precision will carry out the same procedure with two more patients as part of its pilot clinical study. Rapoport said the company has submitted its initial results to a scientific journal, and that having the data publicly available will be a “huge next step.”

Precision also has similar studies in the works with health systems like Mount Sinai in New York City and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Rapoport said Precision is hoping to receive full FDA clearance for its first-generation device next year. 

“The early results for us are tremendously gratifying to see,” Rapoport said. “If you’re lucky, there’s a few times in your life when you get to sort of see something before anybody else sees it in the world.”

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Online estate planning firm Trust & Will raises $25 million in funding round that includes Northwestern Mutual, UBS

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Online estate planning firm Trust & Will raises  million in funding round that includes Northwestern Mutual, UBS

Trust & Will founders, Cody Barbo (CEO), Brian Lamb, and Daniel Goldstein.

Courtesy: Trust & Will

Legal technology company Trust & Will said Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in a Series C funding round. The San Diego-based firm, ranked No. 41 on last year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has now raised $75 million to date.

Trust & Will aims to shake things up in the arcane estate planning industry and make these key wealth preservation and wealth transfer services more accessible to families. Relying on a mix of technology and human oversight, Trust & Will provides legally valid documents that adhere to state guidelines.

The company says the funding will be used to double down on artificial intelligence.

“AI enables families and advisors to plan with greater clarity and confidence,” co-founder and CEO Cody Barbo said in a statement announcing the funding. “By combining technology with human compassion, we’re transforming how people protect and preserve their legacies.”

The new round was led by Moderne Ventures, and includes Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, UBS Next and Erie Insurance. The most recent publicly available valuation figure for Trust & Will was $169 million, according to PitchBook data as of June 2022. The company told CNBC its valuation is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and has increased by more than 5x from its 2020 Series B valuation to its new Series C, but declined to be more specific.

More coverage of the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50

Trust & Will started when two friends wondered why there weren’t more online options to create a will. Most of their financial lives were already online — banking, taxes, insurance — but wills would require thousands of dollars and talking to a lawyer. Or a barebones online template that doesn’t leave room for customization or questions. 

Its closest competitors, LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, focus on a broader variety of services. There’s also FreeWill.com, which offers free templates for people to fill out.

A recent annual report from Trust & Will found that although 83% of Americans believe estate planning is important, only 31% have a will, and 55% have no plan at all. Today, the company says it has helped hundreds of thousands of families create estate plans and settle probate to solve for that problem, and over one million Americans have started their legacy planning on the platform.

The company works directly with individuals and through partnerships with financial institutions. Trust & Will’s partnerships include Bank of America, USAA and Navy Federal. To get the word out to the general public, the company recently hired its first celebrity brand ambassadors, Super Bowl Champion Matthew Stafford and his wife, podcaster Kelly Stafford, to talk about their estate planning experience in a national TV commercial. It also recently became the official estate planning partner to two professional sports teams, the Los Angeles Kings and San Diego Wave.

“Every family deserves access to estate planning, and every professional deserves tools that simplify the process while delivering exceptional results,” Barbo stated in the release. “This Series C funding is more than a company milestone — it’s a step toward transforming estate planning into an essential service that touches every family’s life and legacy.”

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Digital physical therapy provider Hinge Health files for IPO

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Digital physical therapy provider Hinge Health files for IPO

Hinge Health’s Enso product.

Courtesy: Hinge Health

Hinge Health, a provider of digital physical therapy services, filed to go public on Monday, the latest sign that the IPO market is starting to crack open.

Hinge Health uses software to help patients treat musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company’s revenue last year increased 33% to $390 million, according to its prospectus, and its net loss for the year narrowed to $11.9 million from $108.1 million a year earlier.

The IPO market has been quiet across the tech sector for the past three years, but within digital health it’s been almost completely silent, as companies have struggled to adapt to an environment of muted growth following the Covid-19 pandemic. No digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health, and last year the only notable offerings were Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, and Tempus AI, a precision medicine company.

“We have many decades of work ahead,” Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez said in the filing Monday. “We hope you join us on this journey.”

The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”

Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg, Hinge Health’s chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.

Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso. The company claims its technology can help users improve their pain, reduce the need for surgery and cut down health-care costs.

The San Francisco-based company has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. The biggest outside shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to the filing.

Hinge Health’s dual class stock structure gives each share of Class B common stock 15 votes. Almost all of the Class B shares are owned by the founders and top investors.

Employees across more than 2,250 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Target and General Motors, can access Hinge Health’s offerings. The company had more than 532,000 members as of Dec. 31, and more than 20 million people are eligible to enroll, the filing said.

Hinge Health declined to comment.

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Fintech stocks plummet as Wall Street worries about consumer spending, credit

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Fintech stocks plummet as Wall Street worries about consumer spending, credit

People wait in line for t-shirts at a pop-up kiosk for the online brokerage Robinhood along Wall Street after the company went public with an IPO earlier in the day on July 29, 2021 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

It was a bad day for tech stocks, and a brutal one for fintech.

As the Nasdaq suffered its steepest decline since 2022, some of the biggest losers were companies that sit at the intersection of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Stock trading app Robinhood tumbled 20%, bitcoin holder Strategy fell 17% and crypto exchange Coinbase lost 18%. Much of the slide in those three stocks was tied to the drop in bitcoin, which fell almost 5%, continuing its downward trajectory. The price of the leading cryptocurrency is now down 19% in the past month, falling after a big-post election pop in late 2024.

Beyond the crypto trade, online lenders and payments companies also fell more than the broader market. Affirm, which popularized buy now, pay later loans, dropped 11%, as did SoFi, which offers personal loans and mortgages. Shopify, which provides payment technology to online retailers, fell more than 7%.

JPMorgan Chase fintech analysts on Monday highlighted declining consumer confidence as a potential challenge for companies that rely on consumer spending for growth. In late February, the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index slipped to 98.3 for the month, down nearly 7%, the largest monthly drop since August 2021. Walmart recently reported a shift away from discretionary purchases, underscoring the potential trouble.

“Our universe has modestly outperformed the S&P 500 since the election, but sentiment has soured of late on declining consumer confidence and signs of slowing discretionary spend,” the JPMorgan analysts wrote.

The fintech selloff follows a strong rally in the fourth quarter, driven by Fed rate cut expectations and hopes for a more favorable regulatory environment under the Trump administration.

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