An Israeli startup founded by a computational neuroscientist and an inventor behind Apple’s Face ID is attempting to solve one of medicine’s most persistent problems: objectively measuring how the human brain is functioning.

Hemispheric has emerged from more than six years of stealth with $52 million in funding and Descartes, a six-billion-parameter artificial intelligence model designed to interpret electrical brain activity. The company says the technology could eventually help doctors diagnose and treat conditions including PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.

The model was trained on more than 250,000 hours of EEG and behavioral data collected from over 100,000 paid participants at research sites in Israel, Asia and Boston. Participants completed game-like exercises that activated different brain functions while their electrical activity was recorded.

A patient using the system wears a lightweight headset equipped with dry EEG sensors and interacts with an application for approximately 15 minutes. Descartes then analyzes the resulting signals and produces quantitative information that Hemispheric hopes clinicians will eventually use to support diagnoses, predict which treatments may work and monitor a patient’s progress.

The company was founded by CEO Dr. Hagai Lalazar and CTO Gidi Littwin, who co-founded the Israeli facial-recognition company RealFace before it was acquired by Apple. Littwin later worked on technologies behind Face ID and the Vision Pro. Hemispheric plans to use its new funding to pursue regulatory approvals, expand its brain-data network and build partnerships with healthcare providers, governments and pharmaceutical companies.

Its first planned clinical product will focus on PTSD, with the company seeking FDA approval before a possible public rollout. Hemispheric’s broader vision is to make brain testing as routine and accessible as a blood test, replacing at least part of the questionnaires, behavioral observations and trial-and-error treatment that still dominate psychiatric and neurological care.

That vision remains unproven. Independent experts caution that EEG signals vary considerably between people and even within the same patient, while conventional EEG technology has limitations in identifying precisely where activity originates inside the brain. Hemispheric must now demonstrate through clinical studies that its measurements are reliable and genuinely useful for diagnosis and treatment.

Still, the scale of its dataset and the experience of its founders have placed the Israeli company at the center of the growing race to combine artificial intelligence with noninvasive brain technology. Should the platform survive clinical and regulatory scrutiny, it could move doctors closer to something medicine has long lacked: an objective test for the health of the human brain.