Connectome, a Zurich and London-based NeuroTech startup, has closed a pre-Seed financing round of approximately €1.7 million ($2 million) to transform the interpretation of brains and offer a clearer, more personalised view of cognitive health by making it measurable.
The round was led by Redstone, with participation from leading early-stage venture funds, including Concept Ventures and Octopus, along with strategic investors and experienced angels across Switzerland, the UK, Europe, and the US. The round includes €103.6k ($120k) in non-dilutive public innovation funding, alongside private venture capital.
Lucas Scherdel, CEO of Connectome, said, “We started Connectome to address a growing gap: while physical health measurement has advanced rapidly, our ability to understand and protect the brain has not kept pace. Cognitive capacity underpins how we think, work, relate, and age, yet it remains poorly understood. Evidence shows cognitive health is quietly deteriorating at scale, with rising burnout, brain fog, and attention and memory issues, especially among younger generations. Our environments and technologies now place unprecedented demands on the brain, but we lack everyday ways to detect early change or protect long-term cognitive health.
“Connectome exists to close this gap. By measuring brain function longitudinally, we move beyond isolated snapshots to build personalised models of brain function, with the potential to inform future clinical care and disease progression. Understanding the brain is no longer a niche concern – it is essential to human wellbeing and societal resilience.”
Connectome was founded in 2024 by Scherdel and Dr Rufus Mitchell-Heggs. Both the founders are both seasoned neuroscientists with personal experience of brain-related disorders. Scherdel previously led global R&D in consumer health, worked for the WHO, and advised startups and funds in health and tech.
Dr Mitchell-Heggs is a PhD-trained computational neuroscientist and will lead the scientific development and validation of the company’s neural biomarkers. Before joining Connectome, his research focused on understanding the mechanisms underlying memory and social cognition and measuring how these can become disrupted in diseases and disorders.
Connectome aims to provide more reliable insight into how brain activity varies within individuals and how it may shift in relation to lifestyle, environment, and health.
According to the company, this approach has potential relevance across various contexts, including neurodevelopmental differences and neurodegenerative conditions, where early changes may occur long before traditional clinical thresholds are reached. Importantly, the platform is designed to support research, monitoring, and decision-making rather than replace clinical judgement.
The technology is built on research conducted with Imperial College London. The company notes that the LUCID study demonstrated that everyday behaviour leaves a distinctive, measurable signature in brain activity. These signatures can be applied to enhance the measurement of brain activity in real-world, daily situations.
The company states that this method offers new opportunities to understand, monitor, and enhance cognitive function. It has the potential to transform the management of conditions like ADHD and dementia by enabling earlier detection of cognitive changes and providing insights into how to improve cognition.
It further notes that current methods for measuring the brain depend on isolated, static snapshots. Connectome’s first product tackles this by personalising brain measurement, monitoring brain activity multiple times over a period to establish an individual baseline rather than relying on single measurements. By integrating brain data with daily lifestyle factors such as sleep, activity, and behavioural load, it connects brain changes to real-world influences. It helps focus on what those changes mean for each individual, rather than applying broad generalisations.
Explaining the LUCID study, Rufus Mitchell-Heggs, CSO and co-founder, said, “Think of healthy brain blood flow like a neighbourhood rather than a single point. Most healthy people sit within the same broad ‘zone,’ where patterns of oxygen delivery and waste removal look similar. The LUCID study is designed to begin characterising this healthy neighbourhood – establishing what normal variation looks like across individuals and over time.
“When neurological disease or disorder begins to develop, brain blood-flow patterns can start to drift away from this healthy zone. Over time, that drift may form a trajectory toward cognitive impairment. By measuring the brain repeatedly, we can begin to understand which underlying changes drive these shifts – and, in the future, map additional “neighbourhoods” associated with different conditions or risk profiles. Combined with subjective reporting, this approach has the potential to make brain health assessment more objective, personalised, and actionable over time.”
The company mentions that the LUCIID study will continue to explore how reliable repeated measurements are in defining personal brain baselines and further develop systematic methods to use context to refine the interpretation of brain change.
The new funding will enable Connectome to launch the product with a select group of partners and progress development and research to explore new use cases beyond lifestyle and wearables.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/04/connectome-secures-e1-7-million-to-scale-personalised-brain-health-insights-and-early-cognitive-change-detection/
