The brainwaves behind future healthcare

When you get your first diagnosis of diabetes, it all becomes relatively clear that you have to make changes to your lifestyle. I have a daughter, and thinking about them, yeah, sure, you want to be around for your kids, and you want to be around for your wife. You have a serious medical condition; it's going to affect you in their life, and as you get older, it's going to affect you.

I think people will be really surprised at just how many technologies they use in everyday life are powered by investments from venture capital and private equity. I set up IQ Capital with my partners in 2006, very much focusing on early-stage deep tech venture capital. I first met Jason at a pitch event where I was judging. Deep tech is an investment that we make in a sector where we generally have a scientist or an academic at the core who’s come up with an idea that uses really specialized technology.

Neurovalence is a Belfast-based medical device company, and we make a range of technology that can noninvasively stimulate deep parts of the brain, which we hope will be used to treat millions of people across the world. The key area of interest for us is prediabetes. There is actually no treatment for prediabetes other than just trying to improve your lifestyle through diet and exercise, but whenever you introduce a noninvasive technology, the risk is actually so low that you can really impact someone's life at a very early stage.

For Neurovalence, it was extremely important that we had an investor not just financially, but also someone who's really passionate about what we are doing, to really make technology that can help millions of people. Typically, the top founders identify a problem in their daily life which they want to solve with technology. They are very passionate, and they are very, very good at putting this into place. I am historically a tech investor, and it is essential that people with a vision and a passion for things find the necessary financing to make their dreams fly.

One area that we are really interested in is called the hypothalamus, which actually controls your appetite, fullness, cravings, and even how you process glucose. What we’re doing here is sending an electrical signal noninvasively with our technology, using the nerves at the surface just behind the head to send the signal into this deep area of the brain. For example, someone who has prediabetes—our hope is that we can actually stop that from progressing into type 2 diabetes. Their technology could be globally transformative. We’re talking about obesity, type 2 diabetes, sleep insomnia—these are all global epidemics that need to be addressed, and the potential is incredible here: huge markets.

One of our participants in the trial, Paul, had a really interesting result. His blood sugar reduction was really significant, far greater than we would have expected with the weight loss that he achieved. I was convinced that I had one of the placebos, but then they contacted me and said I was actually one of the higher averages of blood sugar drop over a long period. I would hope that it would take me down to a level where I would be completely medication-free, or if not, at a very low dose.

As a small medical device company, receiving VC funding can be transformative for us. That was especially so because it was IQ Capital who were investing in us. Their knowledge and expertise really helped us take it to the next level and really look at the big vision. Meeting these founders with their bold ambition to overcome so many problems in order to come up with successful technologies that make everybody's life safer and easier—that inspires me.