Israel Is Mapping the Human Min —and brain.space Is Leading the Way
Written by Liat Rhodes Gadot – Director of Business Development.
For decades, the brain was the one part of the body technology couldn’t quite reach. Heart rate, sleep, and movement all became measurable and wearable — the mind stayed locked behind expensive, inaccessible equipment. brain.space set out to change that, building the infrastructure to read and standardize brain activity at scale, then turning it into a foundation model that can plug into cars, cockpits, clinics, and eventually any AI system that needs to understand the human it’s working with.
In just a few years, what began as a garage project has become a company with seven patents, a NASA-selected mission to the International Space Station, and partnerships with major automakers. It’s also one of the more compelling companies in the Michigan Israel Business Accelerator’s (MIBA) pipeline — a startup whose U.S. roadmap runs squarely through Michigan
From a Garage to a New Data Category
Founder Yair Levy built the company alongside two physicians treating cognitive disorders and a fourth co-founder with a missile-defense background. The physicians had a familiar problem: no good way to monitor a patient’s brain over treatment — MRI was too expensive, CT carried radiation risk, and every EEG system produced data too inconsistent to trust. So the team built their own hardware. When they showed an early version to investor Sami Sagol, his reaction set the company’s direction: this wasn’t a medical device, it was a new category of data, with the same disruptive potential the heart-rate monitor had for fitness.
A Foundation Model for the Brain
The proprietary headset, Brain Sensei™, uses 115 sensors — five to six times the resolution of a standard clinical EEG cap — and self-mounts in about five minutes via its Brain GPS™ technology. It’s repeatable to roughly 90% accuracy, versus the ~60% considered acceptable in EEG today: the difference between unusable noise and a real dataset.
hat data feeds a foundation model trained on 60,000+ datasets, growing by roughly 4,000 a month, decoding raw brain signal into states like focus, stress, engagement, and fatigue. The final step is distillation — compressing the model to run on hardware that already exists, like an in-cabin camera or a wearable, so customers get brain-model-grade insight without ever deploying the headset itself.
“We're not selling sensors. We're selling the intelligence that sits inside them.”
Rather than navigate hospital regulation and device liability in a narrow EEG market, brain.space licenses its distilled models into automotive, aviation, and brain-health clinics — already live with major OEMs, surfacing insight into driver fatigue and attention that camera-only systems can’t reach alone.
A Relationship Built with Michigan — Through MIBA
brain.space’s connection to Michigan runs through MIBA, the organization built to give Israeli companies like this one a real foothold in the U.S. market. Michigan’s aging population and brain-health research base align directly with brain.space’s commercial wedge, while its automotive and advanced-mobility industry lines up naturally with the company’s OEM driver-monitoring work. brain.space is also scouting a North American manufacturing footprint, with Michigan a leading candidate through MIBA’s network — and the company is currently raising its next round, with U.S. go-to-market as the headline use of funds.
brain.space isn’t alone in that pipeline. Vigilance, which pioneers Disinformation Security for the AI era — monitoring what LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini say about an organization and remediating malicious sources at the root — is looking to MIBA and Michigan for its own U.S. go-to-market. So is CorrActions, whose software-only, in-cabin driver neuromonitoring system is already in use with Volvo, Goodyear, and BlackBerry; the CorrActions team recently visited MIBA’s offices in person
Together, the three companies are a snapshot of what MIBA is built to do: connect Israel’s most ambitious deep-tech companies to Michigan’s research institutions, manufacturing base, and automotive industry — not as a one-off introduction, but as a sustained, two-way pipeline.
