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Gidi Littwin's new AI startup, Hemispheric, makes diagnostic brain scans for conditions like depression, PTSD, and Parkinson’s. He wants the technology to be as cheap and easy as a blood test.

The co-inventor of Apple’s FaceID and Vision Pro technology has spent the last six years building a frontier artificial intelligence model that could one day help decode electrical activity in the brain to diagnose cognitive disorders.

Now, Gidi Littwin’s startup, Hemispheric, has raised $52 million in funding after gathering data on 100,000 people’s brains to train deep learning models to examine the brain without the need for invasive procedures.

Littwin left Apple in 2020, looking for a change. He found it when his Hemispheric cofounder Hagai Lalazar cold-messaged him on LinkedIn. Lalazar had begun to develop artificial intelligence to study the brain without the need for surgery, and was looking for a commercially minded cofounder to drive the company forward. By the time he found Littwin, he had spoken to around 75 candidates.

Littwin had helped develop FaceID, and at that time was working on hand-tracking for an augmented reality product, the Vision Pro. As part of this, he had to collect what he told WIRED were “hundreds of thousands of subjects’ worth of data” to train the deep learning models powering the technology.

“There were massive data collection operations behind these projects and we knew we had to build something very similar at Hemispheric,” Littwin says, “and we have.”

Because each individual’s brain activity looks different, doctors have largely had to rely on subjective questionnaires and behavioral observations to diagnose depression, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. To get around that, Littwin and Hagai collected their “most prized possession:” a quarter of a million hours of brain data from 100,000 paid volunteers across Asia, as well as Tel Aviv and Boston. Subjects undertook a series of activities that look like games but activated different parts of their brains.