A Whoop For Your Brain
Could brain-sensing wearables become the next $10B+ consumer health device?
A few weeks ago, a new wearables startup emerged from stealth and caught my attention.
Called Atlas, the startup announced $14 million in VC funding, and plans to release a “multi-modal brain-sensing wearable” next year.
So basically, a Whoop For Your Brain. A behind-the-ear sensor will track brain signals and decode how behaviors from exercise to phone usage affect mental performance.
I was so intrigued for a couple of reasons…
1. As a consumer, I desperately want this product. Over the last few years, I’ve felt my phone and short-form video slowly destroy my attention span – to the point that sitting on my couch and watching a Netflix show without checking my phone feels like an accomplishment. Most of my friends feel the same way. My Oura ring helped me get control of my sleep. I’d love a wearable to help me get control of my attention span and overall mental sharpness.
2. As an investor, I’m paying close attention to the wearables space, which has gotten a lot of buzz lately. Oura just raised $875 million at an $11 billion valuation. I wrote about it here. Oura and Whoop both announced a huge new product launch with blood panels. Both companies are growing crazy fast; Oura’s sold more rings in the last year than in the previous 12 years combined. Glucose monitors like Levels are growing more popular. Now, more early-stage investors are asking what’s the next wearable category to explode. And I’m seeing more people argue that “brainwaves are the next big biometric.”
But what would it really take for a Whoop For Your Brain to go mainstream?
In my view, the company would need to overcome three huge obstacles. I’ll explain each.
Hardware
Data processing
Consumer adoption
1. Hardware
The most efficient way to measure brain activity is EEG, which basically measures the brain’s electrical activity. Atlas’ product, and most products already on the market, use EEG. The challenge with EEG is it’s really noisy. The most common medical reason to get an EEG scan is to diagnose neurological disorders like epilepsy. Here’s how a medical-grade EEG scan works: a doctor applies a conductive gel to a patient’s scalp and then places ~20 electrode discs on their head. It looks like this.
Even this medical-grade setup isn’t perfect. Signals can be confounded just by eyes blinking and jaws clenching. And when patients place electrodes imprecisely without supervision, the data reliability plummets.
So it’ll take major hardware leaps to create a small, behind-the-ear wearable that effectively measures EEG. A consumer product might not have to be medical-grade accurate; Whoop and Oura measure heart rate less accurately than an electrocardiogram.
There’s also a difference between accurate and precise wearables. Accuracy is how close a wearable’s measurement is to the true physiological value. Precision is how consistent and repeatable those measurements are. If a brain wearable isn’t 100% accurate, but precise enough to report ups and downs in brain activity, then that’s sufficient for consumers.
Nevertheless, creating a consumer-ready brain wearable will require breakthroughs in materials science, signal processing, battery life, and other parts of the hardware.
2. Data
Once the hardware receives signals, data processing becomes the next challenge. Whoop and Oura got started by inviting research subjects to their offices, hooking them up to dozens of lab-grade sensors and their own products, and triangulating the signals. They also ran a bunch of studies in partnership with universities and research labs. Oura and Whoop benefited from the fact that heart rate, HRV and the other biometrics they were measuring had been around for a while. Polar, which developed the world’s first heart rate monitor, was founded in 1977. So Oura and Whoop benefited from decades of consumer datasets.
Brain wearable products have relatively few consumer datasets to work with. A few startups I’ve met in the space have been collecting data fully manually. They’ll pay a friend to do cognitive exercises at a computer, hook them up to both a medical-grade EEG cap and their own product, then triangulate the signals. That’s incredibly slow and expensive. It makes sense that Atlas’ founders are Cambridge and Oxford neuroscience PhDs who were at the research forefront of EEG data processing. Atlas is likely using some novel techniques.
The good news is that recent AI advancements are making data processing exponentially more efficient. AI models can now extract far more signal from the same noisy EEG datasets – identifying patterns which previously required massive labeled datasets.
3. Consumer adoption
Once the product nails hardware and data processing, the last step is convincing consumers to buy (and use!) the product.
In my opinion, this will all come down to form factor. A few brain wearables already exist on the market. See below a market map. Neurable, Muse, Emotiv and other startups all sell headbands and/or over-ear headphones that monitor EEG and provide an Oura-style app that tells you when you’re in a flow state, or when you should take a break because your focus is slipping.
It’s hard to imagine people walking around with large headbands or headphones 24/7. The ideal brain wearable form factor would be something you can put on your head (maybe behind-the-ear), leave on, and forget about. And even more ideal, maybe it becomes a fashion statement or status symbol like Whoop and Oura are today.
But even with this form factor, the company would have to nail adhesive so that it’s easy to apply, clean, and reapply. Creating a seamless user experience is more complicated than with wrist-worn or ring-based devices, since you need adhesion and likely gel to keep the product secure and collecting high-quality data.
I’m curious what first killer use case emerges. For Oura it’s sleep tracking. For a brain wearable, maybe it’ll be white-collar workers optimizing their cognitive performance at the office. Or maybe it’ll be recreational athletes optimizing their focus levels during workouts. I’m also curious how the winning companies will build their brands. Whoop built an aspirational brand early on by marketing with elite athletes like LeBron James and Cristiano Ronaldo. Maybe a brain wearable picks high-performing CEOs like Sam Altman or chess champions like Magnus Carlsen as tastemakers.
Now, let’s assume hardware, data processing and form factor all get figured out. Which company is most likely to build the break-out Whoop For Your Brain?
Maybe it’s an existing player like Neurable. Their headphones probably aren’t their end-state form factor. But in the meantime they’re collecting consumer data, learning about the market and positioning themselves for whenever a behind-the-ear Whoop is technologically viable.
Maybe it’s a new player like Atlas. Rather than Neurable’s incremental approach, they raised a huge first round, and probably have runway for one big shot at releasing a hit consumer product next year.
Maybe it’s a Big Tech company. A couple years ago, Apple quietly applied for a patent on an AirPod design that uses electrodes to monitor brain activity. Google and Snap have also made plays in the space.
Maybe an invasive brain wearable company like Neuralink or Merge Labs (Sam Altman’s Neuralink competitor) takes off, becomes mainstream and renders non-invasive brain wearables useless.
Now we’re getting a bit far afield trying to predict the future…
So I’ll end with this: If someone builds a Whoop For Your Brain with a sleek form factor and a killer use case, then I would buy it as a consumer.
And as an investor, I would love to invest in that startup because I believe that it can be a category-defining company like Oura and Whoop.
If you’re building – or interested in building – in the brain wearables space, please reach out. I’d love to meet you.
It will be interesting to research kids attention span in school with these devices.