Who Are We?

Welcome to NeuroNYC’s Substack! While this page will soon populate with coverage of neurotech developments in New York City and globally, we’re kicking things off by voicing who we are behind the page. What are our goals, and how are our efforts tuned to the metro region’s unique landscape?

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.