Karavela raises €2M+ pre-seed to collect its flagship brain dataset

We are excited to share that Karavela has raised a pre-seed round of €2M+ from leading early-stage investors HCVC, Daphni and First Momentum, alongside strategic business angels from the neuroscience, entrepreneurial and AI ecosystems. This funding marks the first step in our journey to build the first foundation model of the brain trained on a large task-based fMRI dataset to unlock the next generation of biomarkers, clinical tools and brain-computer interfaces.

Pierre-Éric Leibovici & Jonas Simonin from Daphni declare:

The Karavela team embodies French excellence in the field of AI. Alexis, Charles, and Bertrand also represent a paradigm shift, that of researchers increasingly seeking to translate their fundamental research into applied research by taking the leap into entrepreneurship. Daphni aims to accelerate this movement and supports numerous projects spinning off from French and European laboratories.

What’s next

This funding is a first step towards internalising the main resources that Karavela will leverage to build a large data collection and train its models on it. Namely, the pre-seed will allow us to:

• grow our team of neuro-AI experts ;
• scale our MRI acquisition pipeline with international academic partners ;
• finalize our first foundation model prototype ;
• build early clinical POCs with pharma and academic partners.

We are grateful to our investors and partners for supporting our vision and effort in implementing a data-centric endeavour to gain the richest insights as to how the human brain functions. If you're working on CNS therapeutics, neuroimaging, digital biomarkers, or brain-machine interfaces, we would love to talk!