ADHD medtech bags $5.2 million pre-Seed round for its alternative headband treatment

For millions with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the traditional treatment is medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.

But a Sydney medtech startup is hoping to change with with a headband that tracks and treats ADHD symptoms, without the side effects of drugs, in just 20 minutes daily.

Neurode is the brainchild of neuroscientist Nathalie Gouailhardou, who has ADHD, and engineer Damian Sofrevski. The startup has raised US$3.5 million (A$5.2m) in pre-Seed funding.

The round was led by California VC Khosla Ventures with support from PsyMed Ventures and will be used for clinical trials of the headband they’ve developed, which uses electrical stimulation in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

It looks a like a cross between a white picket fence and the headbands Pat Cash wore at Wimbledon in the 80s.

Neurode measures how active your brain is and tracks how that activity changes over time so that you know if your symptoms are improving. It delivers a non-invasive dose of electrical brain stimulation pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with what’s called executive function.

That ranges from issues such as attention and impulse control, as well as emotional regulation and sense of self, memory, language and focus, accessing risk and ambiguity, and value.

Neurode stimulates brain activity with its electric signals to improve responses, personalising the dosage in response to its monitoring of individual brains. Users, who treat themselves at home, can even follow and monitor what’s happening on an app on their phone. Treatment takes less than half an hour daily and progress is tracked on the app.

“With Neurode, I want to lighten the load of ADHD, for other neurodivergent people like me, so we can continue to reach our goals, faster and without the added burden,” Gouailhardou said.

The device has yet to receive regulatory approval from the likes of the US FDA and Australia’s Therapeutics Goods Administration and is currently being used in private beta testing.