NeuroVigil Raises Seed-Stage Financing

San Diego-based NeuroVigil, which has developed a wireless sensor and related technology to analyze human brainwave patterns, says it has closed its first round of financing.

In its statement Monday, the startup did not identify the amount of funding or investors, saying only that the round “was led by an anonymous American industrialist and technology visionary,” and included participants on both coasts. In response to an e-mail query yesterday, NeuroVigil spokeswoman Kathleen Murray described the funding only as a seed-stage investment, and declined to say anything about the size of the funding or to identify the investors.

For an early stage life sciences startup, NeuroVigil has acquired an unusually high profile, due mostly to the company’s founding CEO, Philip Low, who is renowned for publishing a one-page doctoral thesis as a neuroscience graduate student at The Salk Institute. NeuroVigil also won $250,000 in May 2008 at the annual winner-take-all Draper Fisher Jurvetson Venture challenge, and the company won the $30,000 top prize a few days later at a UC San Diego entrepreneurship challenge. NeuroVigil also won the 2010 CONNECT Most Innovative New Product Award in Life Sciences.

By combining its sensor with an algorithm that Low developed as part of his research, the company says it has developed a fundamentally new way to assess brain activity, offering the ability to detect common neurological diseases as well as changes in brain state, well before any symptoms or behavioral changes are apparent.

NeuroVigil’s technology offers pharmaceutical companies a potentially revolutionary technology for assessing the effects of pre-market drugs on the brain and of prospective treatments for sleep disorders, among other things. The technology also could be used to monitor the alertness of nightshift workers, long-haul truck drivers, and military personnel.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.