Across the five boroughs, Long Island, the Hudson Valley, northern New Jersey, and western Connecticut, the metro region is home to more than 5,000 life sciences businesses, the most of any U.S. metro region, leading the Boston region by 30%. Key players include universities like NYU, Columbia, Rockefeller University, Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, and the CUNYs, hospitals like NYU Langone, New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell, Mt. Sinai, Montefiore Einstein, and Northwell Health, and institutions like the New York Genome Center, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the Nathan Kline Institute. Together, these groups received $3.3 billion in NIH funding in 2024, the most federal funding given to life sciences groups in any U.S. metro region. The region is also home to major life sciences companies like Pfizer, Regeneron, Johnson & Johnson, Roivant, Axsome Therapeutics, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Despite a density of talent in the region, New York City’s life sciences startup ecosystem is just starting up. Back in 2014, New York City life sciences startups raised only $50 million in venture capital (VC) funding. Two years later, recognizing economic potential, the city announced LifeSci NYC, a $1 billion commitment to life sciences in the five boroughs. The initiative has focused on increasing square footage of lab space for startups and providing resources to accelerate growth. In 2018, Johnson & Johnson opened JLABS @ NYC in SoHo, a life sciences startup incubator, with help from the city; in 2022, the city cut the ribbon on the Taystee Building in West Harlem, providing lab space for life sciences research groups like Harlem Biospace and a CCNY startup incubator; in 2023, the city committed to build SPARC Kips Bay, a development five times the square footage of the Taystee Building, which will provide more parceled lab space, along with space for New York state and city schools. Besides infrastructure, the city has promoted innovation with credit and resources: in 2018, LifeSci NYC introduced an expansion fund to provide loans and guidance to Seed and Series A life sciences startups; in 2022, the city introduced a yearly Founder Fellowship; in 2023, then-Mayor Eric Adams passed a biotech tax credit designed to benefit early-stage biotech startups.

The city’s life sciences startups responded, and VCs got the memo. A decade later, New York City life sciences startups raised $1.8 billion — 25 times their 2014 total, adjusted for inflation. $2 billion was raised by life sciences startups across the greater metro region that year, the fourth-most among U.S. metro regions. To the city, its investments have been a success, seeing the metro region’s life sciences economic output compound 8% annually from 2014 to 2024, leading the city’s total rate of 2% over that time. The life sciences sector saw a 70.9% GDP growth from 2019 to 2024, doubling that of Finance & Insurance.

The strength of the local life sciences industry and the growth of its startup ecosystem are good proxies for expected growth of many of the most valuable neurotech firms to come: those developing clinical and implanted neurotech, who will draw on much of the same research talent pool as pharma and biotech firms, and whose products will require the same investor resilience to FDA hurdles and extended timelines to revenue. As expected, such neurotech firms have participated in the growth: Synchron, which places a stent electrode in an artery of the brain for computer interfacing, was incorporated in 2016 in Brooklyn and recently reached a $1 billion valuation with a Series D fundraiser of $345 million; Precision Neuroscience, which places electrodes under the scalp for computer interfacing, was founded in Manhattan in 2021 and has raised $155 million in four rounds of funding since.

But for neurotech companies that are not implanting devices or promising medical benefits — imagine Õura using neural data to generate health suggestions, or a company building software and hardware for other neurotech groups — the health of the local tech sector is another good proxy for estimated growth. And, like the life sciences, the local tech startup ecosystem has come into form relatively recently. Recognizing a lag behind other cities’ tech economies in the early 2010s, the city led initiatives to bolster local tech: in 2008, the city started NYC Seed, a VC firm which invested in seed-stage tech startups until 2015, and in 2010 the city gave $100 million to Cornell University to help build Cornell Tech, a graduate tech campus and startup incubator, on Roosevelt Island, which spurred NYU and Columbia to found data science graduate programs soon after. In 2010 Google moved into Chelsea, and in 2012 Facebook opened its first engineering operation beyond the West Coast in Midtown.

These developments brought New York tech up to speed, and by the 2020s it was ready for the A.I. boom, as the percentage of the city’s total VC investments going to local tech startups from 2019 to 2024 grew from 37.6% to 52.4% while the sector saw 54.2% GDP growth, and 35 A.I.-related local startups have reached $1 billion valuations. Those non-implanted, non-clinical neurotech startups saw growth in the same years: CTRL Labs, which uses wrist-based motor signal electrodes for device control, was founded in Midtown in 2015 and then acquired by Meta in 2019 for up to $1 billion (Meta subsequently opened their first New York-based Reality Labs office in its place); Synaptrix Labs, which uses wearable electrodes for computer interfacing, was founded in Manhattan in 2023 and secured up to $10 million in seed funding from Mark Cuban Companies just one year later.

In an environment where world-class scientists and engineers are trained around every corner, startup infrastructure and acceleration have become a public priority, and VCs continue to invest more heavily into life sciences and tech, the New York metro region is well positioned to lead neurotech innovation in coming years.

As a global leader in research, medicine, tech, finance, and policy, the New York metro region is well-positioned to lead neurotech. 5,000+ life science businesses across the five boroughs, Long Island, the Hudson Valley, northern New Jersey, and western Connecticut raised $2 billion in venture capital and received $3.3 billion in NIH funding in 2024 — that’s the most life sciences businesses with the fourth-most VC funding and the most federal funding for the sector across U.S. metro regions. New York City’s startup ecosystem is recognized as #2 globally with a collective valuation of $621 billion, driven by a rising tech sector. Upstate, Albany is at the forefront of the tech policy conversation with its 2025 RAISE Act.

Recognizing the region’s potential, NeuroNYC was founded in 2022 by a group of researchers, engineers, and founders from Sharper Sense, OpenBCI, Synchron, NYU, Columbia University, Cornell Tech, Meta, and Apple on three goals: Community Orchestration, to bridge gaps between hubs of the local neurotech industry; Regional Advocacy, to amplify awareness for neurotech in the New York region; and Ethical Stewardship, to increase transparency of the local ecosystem to ethically guide progress.

Towards these goals, we organize events bringing together key hubs. We began in 2023 with a handful of happy hours at leading local neurotech developers like Synchron and OpenBCI, a tradition that has been ongoing quarterly since. Between these, we held a symposium at Brown Rudnick LLP, where panelists from Columbia, NYU, IBM, and Brainify.AI joined Bay Area counterparts from Stanford, UCSF, and Meta to discuss progress towards neural foundation models for AI; we hosted NeuroBall, a black-tie gala joining industry, law, policy, and VC, sponsored by OpenBCI, Synchron, and Cooley LLP; and we held a Summer Summit with Solomon Partners and Boston Consulting Group, where panelists from Neuvotion, Northwell Health, and Jumpspace VC discussed the state of commercialization of neurotech. (Our next Summer Summit was recently announced — request an invitation for your group!)

Digitally, we streamline resources to help navigate the ecosystem: we’ve created an ecosystem tracker that lists and visualizes companies, labs, clinics, and funders in the metro region; we broadcast trials, products, and papers coming from these groups; our job page centralizes their career openings; and our NeuroNYC Wire collects relevant headlines across local media.

Now, we’re excited to continue promoting the local neurotech ecosystem here, with our Substack. We’ll use our proximity to New York neurotech R&D, policymaking, and markets to bring developing stories to light, engaging with discourse and key figures in the neurotech world. Stay tuned next week for our first article and regular content going forward from then.