Israeli precision drug development co Neuralight raises $25m

Israeli precision drug development company Neuralight has completed a $25 million Series A financing round led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), with participation from Breyer Capital, Samsung Next, VSC Ventures, Viz.ai co-founders Chris Mansi and David Golan, and TheKey co-founder and executive chair Lily Sarafan. This brings to $30.5 million the total amount raised by the company.

Neuralight seeks to improve the design of neurological clinical trials, increase the probability of success for novel neurological therapeutics, as part of a new era of precision medicine for neurology.

The company was founded last year by CEO Micha Breakstone, who exited with his previous company Chorus.ai for $575m, and CTO Edmund Ben-Ami.

Breakstone said, "After watching my grandfather’s battle with Alzheimer’s, I began studying these diseases in depth, and it soon became clear to me that not only are neurological diseases very hard to understand but that cures for these diseases are extremely hard to discover because these diseases lack robust objective and sensitive measures. That’s why we founded NeuraLight, to measure neurological disorders accurately and objectively, and bring precision medicine to neurology."

NeuraLight leverages proprietary computer vision and deep learning algorithms to simultaneously extract all relevant oculometric markers from facial videos captured with a standard webcam or smartphone. These digital markers can serve as a reliable proxy for currently used clinical endpoints, and will provide an accurate snapshot of a person’s neurological status, enabling pharmaceutical companies to introduce smart phenotyping, reduce misdiagnosis, and accurately and sensitively measure disease progression. This, in turn, will help pharma companies increase the probability of success, and develop precision care for neurology. The company’s technology is applicable to a wide range of neurological disorders, initially focused on Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, and ALS.

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on May 25, 2022.