Chay: Welcome to the Open Loop podcast. I'm joined today by Adam Fraser, all the way from Australia, the Mexico City to Australia podcast. Adam, I'd love for you to introduce yourself and let us know a bit about what's going on.
Adam: Great, thank you, Chay, for the opportunity. I'm Adam Fraser, I'm Chief Operating Officer at Omniscient. Based in the Sydney Head Office, but our entire go-to-market focus is on the US. We've been around about six years and we're specialists in a field called connectomics. So in the simplest terms, we use AI to decode the human brain and two FDA clearances, multiple patents. We're well into the journey and we're taking connectomics to the world.
Chay: Love this. There's a bit of an English Aussie accent there. I'd love to hear about your background and see what brought you over to Australia.
Adam: Yeah, good question. I'm going to date myself, Chay, because I was with one of the big six accounting firms. It's now the big four, but I was working in the London office almost like a professional backpacker thought, two years in Sydney, that sounds good. And that was sort of 25+ years ago. My family are like, you never made it home. So I loved life in Australia, ended up settling here. I've had a range of roles in finance, corporate finance, I've been CFO of a listed company. I've worked in the private markets and Yeah, joined Omniscient just over five years ago now as CFO, my first stint in medtech. And it's been an amazing journey, learning so much every day, working with some brilliant people in data science and neuroscience and the field of AI. So really enjoying this phase of my career and looking forward to the next steps.
Chay: So tell us about that journey then from the big six, now the big four, into neurotech. And I appreciate, you're not a neuroscientist, everyone has a different route into the industry. What's that been like for you and what's that learning curve been like?
Adam: Yeah, it was quite serendipitous ending up in NeuroTech. I'd like to say, I'd love to say it was some intentional strategic master plan, but for the first time in about 15 years, I found myself looking for a role in early 2021. You'll appreciate. Had to dust off the 10 page CV. It's like, okay, I need a one page CV and started putting my name out there and got to have a few conversations about CFO roles and got sent an introduction to some people at omniscient, looked at the website, wasn't quite sure. What does this business do? Something to do with the field called connectomics. And as soon as I heard about the mission and the vision and the deeper purpose of the business, I was hooked and I thought this is the one I want to take a swing at. But yeah, it's been quite the learning curve. I was new to med and medtech more broadly, let alone neuroscience, dealing with some of literally the world leading experts in the field of AI and data science and neuroscience and huge learning curve on the medical clinical side of the business and also the specifics of our product offering and knowing when to stay in my lane and when not to, there's a certain level of base knowledge, Anyone that works at Omniscient does and clearly I need to know, I'm talking to investors and I'm talking to the finance community, but knowing when to bring the specialists in when it gets deep and clinical and research focused.
Chay: Yeah, so how comfortable do say you are right now with the Neurotech lingo, with the market?
Adam: It's taken a while, but I joked with one of our co-founders the other day, you know, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, because when I'm surrounded by the geniuses that work at Omniscient, you know, I'm the least, one of the least knowledgeable clinical neuroscience people, but when I'm talking to investors, and it's actually an important point, even med, health, even neuro investors, the field of connectomics is so new that suddenly you become kind of leading expert in the room because you're surrounded by people that very often have not even heard what the word connectomics is when I first walk in.
Chay: Yeah, I'm trying to think the first time I came across this conversation with someone in London like a few years ago, they mentioned it was the most exciting new up and coming area within NeuroTech they were looking forward to seeing it sort of grow. And obviously we've been following you guys for a little while now and know some of the US team, but it's still pretty small. But the Aussie NeuroTech market is growing in itself. It's kind of cool to see such a niche company have a global expansion out of Australia.
Adam: Yeah, no, we're very proud of what we're achieving from a humble base six and a half years ago, seven years ago, the company didn't even exist. If you take a step back, we're a couple of decades behind where genomics finds itself. So you had the Human Genome Project and you fast forward now 20, 30 years looking at the personalized treatments, particularly in oncology and the momentum of progress there. we honestly feel connectomics can do the same thing in the field of neuroscience and neurotech. Human Connectome Project, which is analogous to the Human Genome Project, was kickstarted in 2009. So it's sort of Wash U and Harvard and Oxford and some major academic institutions funded by the NIH under the Obama administration. Only really, drip fed its findings, but the major findings came out in 2016. that really kind of formally established the field. it gave a kind of common base from which researchers and commercial organizations like Omniscient could advance the field of connectomics. You know, it's been around for some time. There's 100,000+ scientific papers about connectomics, but we think we're the first to really seriously take it out of the lab, into the market. And yeah, we're now the market leader in the field. It's going amazingly well. We've got tremendous momentum, but yeah, absolutely acknowledge how early we are in the journey of taking connectomics into clinical practice.
Chay: Tell us a bit then about what it is really from a foundational perspective. What does it mean? What are you trying to build and how does it apply to a clinical practice?
Adam: Sure, so we've got two FDA clearances, hopefully soon to be a third FDA clearance. But the foundations of our platform, and we were very intentional about taking a platform approach to Connectomics as opposed to a single indication, a point solution for one indication. We'd like to think of the Windows 95 operating system of the brain data economy or the Connectomics economy. So multiple dozens, if not hundreds of use cases can sit modular style on top of our platform, but the foundation's now in place with our two FDA clearances and it's the structural connectome and the functional connectome. And this is where the Google Map analogy is actually quite pertinent. So in the same way, Google Maps shows you where are the roads, but also what is the traffic on the roads. The structural connectome shows you where the networks are. What are the networks of the human brain? 86 billion neurons joined together with tracts, with parcels, with circuitry and then the functional connectome is the traffic on the networks. So the traffic on the roads and the identity of the roads. So we can see not only how the brain is wired, what are those neural pathways, the neural highways of the brain, how are they connected, which for some use cases is the main game, such as say neurosurgical planning. What am I going to cut through if I take this trajectory into the brain? But as you move towards, you know, coma, epilepsy, definitely in the fields of psychiatry and mental health, it's all about the connectivity of the brain. How is the brain firing? Which areas are underactive? Which areas are overactive? And we think that can unlock a huge amount of clinical insight in the area, particularly of mental health, but really any neurological disorder.
Chay: So it's a combination of surgical planning tools and that to make sure that we're not obviously damaging any parts of the brain during very important surgeries, but also at the same time creating a foundational knowledge of how the brain talks to itself, I suppose.
Adam: Yes, it's sort of MAPS targets reports. So MAPS, again, the primary use case we focused on in our initial, we call it our land and expand. You can't talk to a hospital about 100 use cases or even a dozen use cases. You have to pick a clinical indication or a clinical focus point. So given the background of our founder team, neurosurgical planning was where we began. And there it's all about what am I going to potentially cut through? What defects? What are the tradeoffs in terms of impact of this surgery. And we've got some amazing case studies of people, avoiding certain networks or very confrontingly having fact-based discussions about trade-offs. You know, do I want more damage to my memory or my language? Horribly confronting conversations, but rather have a fact-based, insight-driven conversation in advance rather than kind of going in blindly. And moving into other indications over time where it's all about both the location of the networks and how those networks are firing, in what pattern and that can unlock, our next use cases are going to be focused on brain injury. you know, stroke, traumatic brain injury, coma, and also deep brain stimulation, DBS. Anyone that's putting something into the brain, targeting part of the brain, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation or focused ultrasound, or trying to understand, you know, behaviors and cognitive symptoms, we think connectomics has got a huge amount to add. It's not the only data point, but we think it's a very important incremental data point that, you know, pre-AI, pre-data science, pre the advances in compute power you need to look at 86 billion neurons in a human brain, this was impossible to do.
Chay: Yeah, I've seen some work around like mapping like mammal brains, for instance, and so forth and trying to create this like every single neuron and every single sort of wiring mapped out. And it's obviously taking decades to get to a point of mapping like a square inch, for instance. And how does that work from your perspective then? Is it like a, just a real time map based on a specific area of the brain based on what you need for that specific purpose in that time? Or we're trying to create something more sort of permanent and more model based for future of work, I suppose.
Adam: So it's kind of a bit of all of the above, but yes, there's been a lot of work on fruit flies when you get to the sort of micro-connectome. We're operating at what's called the macro-connectome level. So again, back to the human connectome project, there's in essence eight major networks in the human brain. And there's been times in human history where people thought the whole of the brain was involved in every decision. Then there were times when it was just a a specific sort of anatomical location of the brain was involved. What we now understand, a bit like an orchestra, there are different parts of the brain talking to each other to perform different functions. They're the major connectomics networks. You know, when you get to sort of vision language motor, there were reasonable sort of anatomical markers and pretty good cumulative knowledge about those parts of the brain. But what connectomics really unlocks is those higher cognitive networks, those things that make us human. It's really your soul, your personality, your ability to have emotions, to regulate your emotions, to multitask, to focus when you're ruminating. These are the things that those higher cognitive networks can unlock. And this is where we see just huge potential for connectomics in mental health down the track. So getting sort of granular, the sort of MRI tech, image tech level, there's different types of scan that we take as our source data, there's the classic structural MRI, almost the anatomical MRI where MRIs began. And then you have DTI or tractography, diffusion tensor imaging, was kind of level one mapping that sort of starts to give you that network or track based view of the brain. And really the key unlocker is functional MRI. It's the traffic of the brain. It looks at the blood oxygen levels and you can understand again, start to get some understanding of which parts of the brain are firing, are talking too much, are talking too little and enormously complicated to take even ingest the data from different manufacturers of MRI machines, let alone the machine learning steps you need to kind of make sense of it and present, bite-sized useful chunks to clinicians. I think that's really what Omniscient is doing. As I said, 100,000+ papers in the lab, amazing work being done in connectomics but it's not always necessarily scalable and accessible and easy to digest. It's such a complex field and that's a lot of what we do. We understand the questions that clinicians will be asking and we want to give them the right information in the right form at the right time.
Chay: Yeah, it's amazing. I love that you're, you mentioned mental health a few times there and I've interviewed a few people in the mental health space looking at various different mental health treatments and neurotechs, TMS, TDCS, even like neurofeedback, for instance, as well. what are your sort of thoughts and findings in that space? Owen Muir, for instance, his interview was saying, were starting to appreciate the brain more as like a more mental health, brain health issues as a electricity problem, as opposed to a chemical problem. Is this something you're seeing and you're uncovering maybe within the connectome space?
Adam: Yeah, look, and again, to be clear, we're back to the sort of picks and shovels analogy or the Intel inside of the Microsoft office. We're a platform, we're agnostic to treatments, to providers, to indications. So it's an area of absolute interest for the long term. I would say, Many employees join Omniscient, many investors come on the journey with Omniscient for a whole range of reasons. And we want to build a very commercially robust, a very commercially successful business. But I think mental health is kind of the North Star for a lot of people in the business, both employees and shareholders. So it's very early days in terms of, I guess, change management, particularly in psychiatry. So the way we look at the addressable market, pick a number, it's hard to get very precise data. There's about 10 million brain MRI scans happening in the US every year already. But that doesn't include the 60 million plus people with a diagnosable mental health disorder in the US today. The standard of care in psychiatry today, bizarrely, does not involve studying the organ that is driving the conditions themselves. So having an MRI, doing connectomic analysis, doing a kind of blood test of the brain is currently not part of the workflow. We'd love to get there, but realistically, there's a longer term kind of change management across mental health, across psychiatry to play out. But yeah, we're very supportive of, we want to create a kind of thriving ecosystem around connectomics.
Chay: Yeah, three biggest topics in neurotech I think at the moment are around mental health, neurodegenerative and brain data and neuroethics as well. they're all kind of talk to each other, I suppose, but they seem to be at the hottest areas of change in neurotech right now. And I think everything you've touched on so far has covered those areas. I think historically there's been things like pain management and urology for neuromodulation, so was huge, multi-billion dollar industries, it seems to be changing now. be pointing towards the brain more and more often so really exciting stuff that you've to building.
Adam: It is and again to get one level deeper in terms of our platform we have the FDA cleared clinical areas of our platform but we also have a research module discovery module we're partnering I think we've got 30 plus projects on the go right now that just we're directly involved with and there's many many other institutions utilizing our platform to perform research and yeah, there's some really exciting areas across mental health, across epilepsy, coma, PTSD, OCD, the whole spectrum of brain health challenges and yeah, very happy that we can support that activity.
Chay: Yeah, you mentioned as well like it being agnostic across indications. I always think like founders of businesses often cover, you know, two different buckets. One is very, very scientifically focused, trying to focus on one indication. The other one is building amazing technology and then trying to work out where you can use it afterwards. And they're both equally successful. But I'd love to know about the founders and what their focus was originally and what their backgrounds are and that space really.
Adam: Yeah, so we think we've got the Venn diagram covered in terms of our founders.
Chay: Ha!
Adam: So we've got this sort of AI data science guru and then the neurosurgical neurologist, you know, brain expert. And then our CEO comes from big tech. So we sort of dovetail the commercial expertise to taking SAAS or taking tech into the market, obviously myself supporting from the commercial side. And then the science guys, you know, working their magic. We call them the Lennon and McCartney of the Omniscient Founders team. They dream up the magic in the lab. And then we obviously look at the product market fit and the regulatory environment, the TAMs, the change management workflow. Where can we play? Because it's a nice challenge to have in that, like I said earlier, there are literally dozens of paths, dozens of use cases, this geographic expansion. There's pharma, there's BCI, there's so many areas we can play in, but what is the logical sequence as a startup, bite-sized chunks, you've got to do it sequentially in a sequence that makes sense given capital constraints and just the commercial practicalities of taking something very new and very disruptive into the market.
Chay: Yeah, I often have these conversations with founders from a recruitment perspective or an advisory perspective where people are talking about, we've made this tech, we've made this software, and now here's what it can do. And now we're to put together a pitch deck and start talking about the eight different things it can do. And it's sort of like, let's hone in on one or two things here. Like, what are we trying to solve first of all? And then we can sort of launch other brands to it. So it sounds like you guys have probably encountered that earlier on, like, bloody hell, we can do a lot with this.
Adam: We can do a lot with this and it's not like a consumer app where you can kind of stick it in the app store and literally
Chay: Yeah.
Adam: within hours start monitoring user behavior, user experience, number of downloads. For very understandable and very valid reasons, there are gates and friction points in med. The FDA being the obvious one, but just driving change within the US hospital system is slow and painful and doesn't come easy. So you've got to be very pragmatic about how you navigate those realities. And again, by having one of our founder team, he's personally done thousands of tumor resections, he's worked in the US hospital system. He knows what is gonna work, what is likely to work, what's probably not gonna work. In a slide deck, things can look very easy. In the US hospital system, you hit the wall of reality very quickly.
Chay: Yeah, I've worked with a few sort of disruptive tech companies in the past in like the clinical and surgical setting. it's not that the conversations commercially are often not about whether or how amazing the tech is, it's whether or not you can convince a surgeon who's been doing their job for very long time that they need new technology, which will improve their life, but they've also been very, comfortable in the life they've had using existing technology. Is that something that you guys have come across too, just from adoption of new tech, right?
Adam: I think so. And like any, you know, the early adopter curve is alive, well and kicking, you get those early adopters that jump in very
Chay: Yeah.
Adam: quickly. And then to make it scalable, you've got to get to the, you know, the mainstream majority. And there's a lot of things at play. There is obviously the robust scientific evidence necessary to convince people that they should change their behavior. And again, as much as there are thousands, tens of thousands of papers on Connectomics it is still a relatively new field. And then you've got the pure human resistance to change. You're right. Maybe I'm 20, 25 years into my career, I'm going very well. I'm a brain surgeon, I'm a neurologist. The way I think I've been doing it seems to have been working fine for me. I'm suddenly out of my comfort zone to my AI and machine learning and connectomics. This all sounds very new and scary. Med Ed is our marketing, medical education. We run a forum called the Connectomics Circle where we allowed peers to get together and share knowledge, share best practice, tell their stories. And it's all about driving the research that illustrates the efficacy and the positive economic benefits of adopting new technology.
Chay: that. That's really what it comes down to isn't it? You've to show people in a practical setting rather than trying to sell it to them first of all. I I imagine also as well as the US is sort of the gold standard of commercialization and I see a lot with European clients too and obviously lot of Australian clients. What's that process been like for you guys? Was there a great success in Australia first before coming over to the US or was it just hey let's get into that US hospital system?
Adam: No, look, whilst we are an Australian top co, head office was here, the founders met here, the IP was effectively generated here, we've never really commercially focused on the Australian market in terms of go to market. It's not quite this simple, but if you can crack the US market and become standard of care in the US market. In essence, the world becomes your oyster. I get, you know, of course you could start in Germany or Japan or Brazil or anywhere, but we felt the US was the place to start. We're trying to stay focused. We get approached all the time about opportunities in global markets. And we've dabbled in the early days with, you know, proofs of concept and, research. Obviously, we're open to working with anyone anywhere in the world. But yes, sequentially, we think we want to kind of crack up in the US, hopefully become standard of care in neurosurgical planning. Then we move on to deep brain stimulation and stroke and coma and many other use cases. And we feel once we're truly established as market leader in the US, then yeah, absolutely there is huge global applicability and a global opportunity here for omniscient in in connectomics.
Chay: Yeah, that makes sense. mean, it's often you see companies trying to crack it where they are first and move out, based on what you guys are trying to build and grow in the volume of this, all these procedures and also the money in the US healthcare system too, allows the growth and the expansion of the business elsewhere by focusing on this first of mean, what does the, what's the coding landscape like and the reimbursement landscape, how does it work from that perspective for something like this, which is so new and yeah, quite unique.
Adam: Well, is, I mean, this is part of the complexity of what we do. There's the call it the MRI tech, the image tech, the ingestion of MRI data is no small thing and the analysis and of that. And then there's the pure call it the UX wrap at the software. Like we are a software company as well. We build a SAAS platform happens to be focused on a very complicated field called connectomics. But yeah, so we have data science team, clinical research team, reimbursement team, et cetera. But of course, just a standard engineering capability as well. So there's the AI aspect in terms of what's baked into the product and kind of intrinsic to Connectomics itself. And then like all companies around the world, we're embracing AI in terms of just whole of company productivity, whether that's sales, marketing, med-ed, customer success, finance, legal, HR across the business, but definitely in coding, they've been very quick to jump on. the AI capabilities to improve their productivity. Reimbursement's an interesting one. So I mentioned we've got two FDA clearances, which is kind of your table stakes and a huge lift to get there, a huge sort of credibility bill to get those clearances and build the foundations of the platform. But reimbursement is what you need to truly kind of oil the wheels of commerce and scale. you need reimbursement and very exciting news just in calendar 2026, the first Category III CPT code 1039T insight for Connectomic analysis was approved that by the AMA. So category III is more a tracking of activity as opposed to having a payment associated with it, but an absolutely massively important strategic symbolic marker on the road to a category one, which is where the payment So getting acknowledgement that Connectomic insight over and above generating an MRI, call it a 2D standard picture MRI, yeah, that was already happening for many decades, to have Connectomic analysis recognized as part of the workflow is a hugely, hugely symbolic moment. So again, one of the many things in a medtech or really any startup business, those projects you have to work on that are under the bonnet. They don't necessarily generate revenue this quarter, next quarter, or even this year, but massively important sort of foundational steps if you're trying to build a scale global business.
Chay: Yeah, it doesn't sound like I'm underplaying it, but you do have to start somewhere, right? It's that first step in the right direction. And I think every
Adam: Correct.
Chay: technology now that we take for granted, any sort of imaging or even surgical tool, for instance, at some point started there as an observed technology. So really exciting. What's the competition
Adam: Yeah. Yep.
Chay: landscape look like for you guys in the US now? You guys are definitely ahead of the curve. I've been tracking you guys for a while. I the US team, but what's it looking like from a competition?
Adam: Yeah, good question. Kind of as ever, it depends how you define the TAM or the addressable market we're going after. Clearly, there's a range of tools addressing a range of neurological disorders. But in terms of call it mapping solutions, we definitely feel like we are the market leader, back to without getting too inside baseball on image tech, DTI. call it entry level mapping, was around before Omniscient. So it's not to say there were no brain maps before we launched our Quicktome platform. But again, a good analogy one of our founders talks about is DTI. It's not useless by any extent of the imagination, but it's like looking at a map of a city and the highway is given the same prominence as the laneway behind your house and the high street in the village. It's just a massive information and visually incredibly captivating. If people want to Google DTI maps, it looks amazing. But as a clinical user, short of time, needing bite-sized chunks of utility and information wasn't very helpful. And we've sort of taken that to the next level. And that's where you get groupings into networks and you can analyze the traffic on those networks. So in terms of A broad-based Connectomics platform, I think we're really the only game in town. There are other mapping solutions. We'd consider our tech to be of a superior, know, detailed granularity insight generation. And back to the sort of platform, there are some point solutions that utilize Connectomics, but it would be a single kind of like a TMS, you know, a bundle of hardware and software with a TMS manufacturer for a single indication like treatment resistant depression. We want a thriving ecosystem. We want people to succeed in the field of connectomics, but again, they're making very sort of narrow bets, almost kind of biotech in nature. It's either a home run or it's a strike out and pack up your bags. And we're trying to take a sort of more horizontal view and let a thousand flowers bloom on our platform.
Chay: Yeah, competition's good, right? But I think being the first one into the market with the most advanced technology, there's also a pressure as well, isn't there, to maintain innovation and to keep growing, but by being so ahead of the curve in such a niche market and having this big vision already, which is great, because I think a lot of early stage businesses enter a market with a really narrow vision of I'm going to become the expert in this, but I think you guys have this like, can do all of this stuff. It's really exciting.
Adam: Yeah, look, broader than Neurotech and broader than Connectomics being a first mover, I would think overall is a very good thing. But it's, you know, there's pros and cons of everything. I mentioned medical education and the marketing burden to educate the field as the first mover. And, you know, arguably a lot of our med-ed effort and kind of knowledge transfer of best practice can lift the entire field of Connectomics. Right now we're the market leader and we back ourselves to stay there. So others can benefit from that, but there is a big lift in med being the first in any field because again, when you walk in the door and even the most expert of neurosurgeon or neurologist or stroke practitioner, often will be starting at ground zero in terms of their knowledge of Connectomics. I think that's starting to change. I mean, we're now six years into that and we are now starting to notice as we walk in the room, people going, no, you don't have to convince me of the field of Connectomics. I'm there. Let's talk more specifically. But it's been a long road to get here.
Chay: Yeah, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's bloody difficult to get this product in front of people, isn't it? To build them and then get it in front of the right people. mean, tell me just quickly then, because I do want to ask about your podcast too, but tell me about where you are now as a business and what the plans are for 27, 28, 29, what you think the growth looks like.
Adam: Yeah, look, the first six, you know, overnight success after seven years of grind, even to get where we are today has been a long patient lift and Med always works, it works slower than you'd like to, especially if you've been in other fields in direct to consumer and back to, you know, apps in the app store that can, you know, pop very quickly. It takes a grind. You've got to build trust. You've got to build credibility. We've done that. We've built the foundations. We've now got around 100 paying customers in the US across hospitals and clinics. So we're hitting some very impressive milestones given, yeah, we'd always like to do more, but in the med world, we're actually moving pretty quickly. We concluded a Series D fundraise in December of 2025. We'd been backed by some wonderful high-net-worth and family office investors for the first kind of six years of our journey. brought in a couple of institutional investors, so Australian based venture capital investors, including the NRF, the government effectively, know, innovation fund for Australia. So that's given us an absolute, important milestone on the journey. But yeah, it's all about, nobody rings the bell when you go from startup to scale up, but I would say we're now moving to the kind of scale up phase rather than the raw kind of land grab. market development, get some runs on the board. We're now getting to a point where we're looking at scaling. Obviously, I talked about expanding across more use cases in the US and starting to think about even broader fields like BCI and pharma and whole body scanning. There's a whole range of areas we think we can go into as well as overseas. It's mapping out the next phases and let's see where we can get to.
Chay: Well, it really, really excited to watch. And I've obviously been tracking you guys for a while and that raise was huge. And I'm always seeing new hires being announced. It's great to see, but I would like to ask you, maybe as a final set of questions around your own podcast, The Business of Neurotech. I mean, it's been fantastic to watch it. I think it launched around the same time as my first episode came out. And this has been awesome to see the guests you'd be getting on. What was the inspiration behind starting that?
Adam: I've always thought, again, as a new field, I'm a big fan of podcasts, firstly, just as a consumer when I'm running, when I'm traveling, when I'm doing anything. I love the multitask aspect of podcasting. You can always be listening. I love the fact that you can get any subject matter expert in their field in such a niche way and listen in an in-depth manner to podcasts. I've always been a fan of the medium. I always thought there was an opportunity in ConnecTomics to take a kind of business view of the world. It's quite interesting. There's many clinical kind of focus podcasts, whether it's the research, the science. But as I started to look for that intersection of the business of Neurotech, it seemed to be strangely void. It's like, there's a million plus podcasts. Surely there must be a couple of dozen around the world. But
Chay: Mmm.
Adam: I asked some people that I trust that are very active in the field and there didn't seem to be one. So I thought, yeah. With the fundraise done, know, sort of a little bit of a release to pursue some of these kind of, you know, thought leadership and industry conversation type processes. So yeah, I just thought I'd give it a go. I'm a dozen podcasts in now. I'm going on a fortnightly rhythm and so far so good. I mean, it's got to be a passion project if you're a podcaster, because I think that
Chay: Yeah.
Adam: eventually you will run out of steam if you're doing it purely as kind of some, you know, top of funnel business idea. You've got to kind of want to do it. as I regularly say to my guests, I would very happily have spent the last 45 minutes having this conversation. We just happened to have recorded it. It's just kind of two people that
Chay: Yeah.
Adam: work in the industry that's still relatively new in the bigger scheme of things. And we're all kind of working it out together. And there are some absolutely just brilliant minds focused on on Neurotech. I've been lucky already to have some of them on the podcasts and yeah, look forward to continuing it.
Chay: Yeah, it's great isn't it? To people within the Neurotech industry, there's obviously lots of conversation to happen all the time about what the exciting new technologies are, what the different things are that are kicking off all the time. But the reality is that outside of it, there's not really much knowledge about what the hell's going on. So it's really, really interesting to listen to yours and to hear the unique perspective of the investment community, the CEOs and so forth. And obviously as a CFO and a COO yourself, you have a unique perspective on that too. So what are the, if you could say like one or two of the really, really unique things that you've learned from those interviews? is that maybe you weren't expecting from the podcast that gave you a unique perspective.
Adam: Yeah, no, looks a good question, Chay. I mean, everyone has brought such a different field. I try and get a blend of founders, investors and analysts. Everyone brings a slightly different lens to the same kind of core set of challenges. What's been interesting is that BCI has come up, I think, in every single podcast, whether or not I intentionally try and steer the conversation that way or otherwise. So that's clearly kind of the hot topic in terms of momentum and volume of capital and deal flow and just, guess, attention outside the Neurotech community, it seems to be starting to cut through Elon Musk, Neuralink, and now just so many other startups coming into that space. The Importance of BCI has been one thing that's kind of come back at me, but I think the relative newness of the sector. is coming through because when you're inside the tent and you feel like everything's Neurotech and then you sort of put the volume of capital that's coming in and compare it to AI, large language models, data centers and many other areas, you realize sort of how small we are in the bigger scheme of things. But I'm very bullish on the sector. I really do believe in 10 years time, this will be an investment class in its own right. There'll be specialist Neurotech funds or at the very least, certainly the big boys in Silicon Valley will be, yeah, they're already starting to play predominantly in BCI, but I think they'll all increase their exposure to Neurotech over time.
Chay: Yeah, I completely agree. I think there's this lot of little bubbles emerging all the time and also existing technologies that are evolving and allowing greater patient access like we touch on TMS. Now that a few years ago was just two or three of the big players and yet it was in clinic procedures and now it's one day programs. And also, yeah, BCI and the Brain Foundation model market that's emerging outside of that. Super interesting. I think we're on the verge. I feel like this year feels a bit a turning point, I think, with some of the investments we're seeing and also the international investments and I'm writing something about Chinese Neurotech and in August I've seen about 12 headlines which is crazy so watch this space and that one mate but yeah but look Adam I really appreciate your time thank you so much I know that the time zones are a bit bonkers but I do appreciate the efforts
Adam: No worries. Thank you for hosting me. Great conversation. Thanks, Chay.
Chay: Cheers.
Adam: Great, thank you, Chay, for the opportunity. I'm Adam Fraser, I'm Chief Operating Officer at Omniscient. Based in the Sydney Head Office, but our entire go-to-market focus is on the US. We've been around about six years and we're specialists in a field called connectomics. So in the simplest terms, we use AI to decode the human brain and two FDA clearances, multiple patents. We're well into the journey and we're taking connectomics to the world.
Chay: Love this. There's a bit of an English Aussie accent there. I'd love to hear about your background and see what brought you over to Australia.
Adam: Yeah, good question. I'm going to date myself, Chay, because I was with one of the big six accounting firms. It's now the big four, but I was working in the London office almost like a professional backpacker thought, two years in Sydney, that sounds good. And that was sort of 25+ years ago. My family are like, you never made it home. So I loved life in Australia, ended up settling here. I've had a range of roles in finance, corporate finance, I've been CFO of a listed company. I've worked in the private markets and Yeah, joined Omniscient just over five years ago now as CFO, my first stint in medtech. And it's been an amazing journey, learning so much every day, working with some brilliant people in data science and neuroscience and the field of AI. So really enjoying this phase of my career and looking forward to the next steps.
Chay: So tell us about that journey then from the big six, now the big four, into neurotech. And I appreciate, you're not a neuroscientist, everyone has a different route into the industry. What's that been like for you and what's that learning curve been like?
Adam: Yeah, it was quite serendipitous ending up in NeuroTech. I'd like to say, I'd love to say it was some intentional strategic master plan, but for the first time in about 15 years, I found myself looking for a role in early 2021. You'll appreciate. Had to dust off the 10 page CV. It's like, okay, I need a one page CV and started putting my name out there and got to have a few conversations about CFO roles and got sent an introduction to some people at omniscient, looked at the website, wasn't quite sure. What does this business do? Something to do with the field called connectomics. And as soon as I heard about the mission and the vision and the deeper purpose of the business, I was hooked and I thought this is the one I want to take a swing at. But yeah, it's been quite the learning curve. I was new to med and medtech more broadly, let alone neuroscience, dealing with some of literally the world leading experts in the field of AI and data science and neuroscience and huge learning curve on the medical clinical side of the business and also the specifics of our product offering and knowing when to stay in my lane and when not to, there's a certain level of base knowledge, Anyone that works at Omniscient does and clearly I need to know, I'm talking to investors and I'm talking to the finance community, but knowing when to bring the specialists in when it gets deep and clinical and research focused.
Chay: Yeah, so how comfortable do say you are right now with the Neurotech lingo, with the market?
Adam: It's taken a while, but I joked with one of our co-founders the other day, you know, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, because when I'm surrounded by the geniuses that work at Omniscient, you know, I'm the least, one of the least knowledgeable clinical neuroscience people, but when I'm talking to investors, and it's actually an important point, even med, health, even neuro investors, the field of connectomics is so new that suddenly you become kind of leading expert in the room because you're surrounded by people that very often have not even heard what the word connectomics is when I first walk in.
Chay: Yeah, I'm trying to think the first time I came across this conversation with someone in London like a few years ago, they mentioned it was the most exciting new up and coming area within NeuroTech they were looking forward to seeing it sort of grow. And obviously we've been following you guys for a little while now and know some of the US team, but it's still pretty small. But the Aussie NeuroTech market is growing in itself. It's kind of cool to see such a niche company have a global expansion out of Australia.
Adam: Yeah, no, we're very proud of what we're achieving from a humble base six and a half years ago, seven years ago, the company didn't even exist. If you take a step back, we're a couple of decades behind where genomics finds itself. So you had the Human Genome Project and you fast forward now 20, 30 years looking at the personalized treatments, particularly in oncology and the momentum of progress there. we honestly feel connectomics can do the same thing in the field of neuroscience and neurotech. Human Connectome Project, which is analogous to the Human Genome Project, was kickstarted in 2009. So it's sort of Wash U and Harvard and Oxford and some major academic institutions funded by the NIH under the Obama administration. Only really, drip fed its findings, but the major findings came out in 2016. that really kind of formally established the field. it gave a kind of common base from which researchers and commercial organizations like Omniscient could advance the field of connectomics. You know, it's been around for some time. There's 100,000+ scientific papers about connectomics, but we think we're the first to really seriously take it out of the lab, into the market. And yeah, we're now the market leader in the field. It's going amazingly well. We've got tremendous momentum, but yeah, absolutely acknowledge how early we are in the journey of taking connectomics into clinical practice.
Chay: Tell us a bit then about what it is really from a foundational perspective. What does it mean? What are you trying to build and how does it apply to a clinical practice?
Adam: Sure, so we've got two FDA clearances, hopefully soon to be a third FDA clearance. But the foundations of our platform, and we were very intentional about taking a platform approach to Connectomics as opposed to a single indication, a point solution for one indication. We'd like to think of the Windows 95 operating system of the brain data economy or the Connectomics economy. So multiple dozens, if not hundreds of use cases can sit modular style on top of our platform, but the foundation's now in place with our two FDA clearances and it's the structural connectome and the functional connectome. And this is where the Google Map analogy is actually quite pertinent. So in the same way, Google Maps shows you where are the roads, but also what is the traffic on the roads. The structural connectome shows you where the networks are. What are the networks of the human brain? 86 billion neurons joined together with tracts, with parcels, with circuitry and then the functional connectome is the traffic on the networks. So the traffic on the roads and the identity of the roads. So we can see not only how the brain is wired, what are those neural pathways, the neural highways of the brain, how are they connected, which for some use cases is the main game, such as say neurosurgical planning. What am I going to cut through if I take this trajectory into the brain? But as you move towards, you know, coma, epilepsy, definitely in the fields of psychiatry and mental health, it's all about the connectivity of the brain. How is the brain firing? Which areas are underactive? Which areas are overactive? And we think that can unlock a huge amount of clinical insight in the area, particularly of mental health, but really any neurological disorder.
Chay: So it's a combination of surgical planning tools and that to make sure that we're not obviously damaging any parts of the brain during very important surgeries, but also at the same time creating a foundational knowledge of how the brain talks to itself, I suppose.
Adam: Yes, it's sort of MAPS targets reports. So MAPS, again, the primary use case we focused on in our initial, we call it our land and expand. You can't talk to a hospital about 100 use cases or even a dozen use cases. You have to pick a clinical indication or a clinical focus point. So given the background of our founder team, neurosurgical planning was where we began. And there it's all about what am I going to potentially cut through? What defects? What are the tradeoffs in terms of impact of this surgery. And we've got some amazing case studies of people, avoiding certain networks or very confrontingly having fact-based discussions about trade-offs. You know, do I want more damage to my memory or my language? Horribly confronting conversations, but rather have a fact-based, insight-driven conversation in advance rather than kind of going in blindly. And moving into other indications over time where it's all about both the location of the networks and how those networks are firing, in what pattern and that can unlock, our next use cases are going to be focused on brain injury. you know, stroke, traumatic brain injury, coma, and also deep brain stimulation, DBS. Anyone that's putting something into the brain, targeting part of the brain, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation or focused ultrasound, or trying to understand, you know, behaviors and cognitive symptoms, we think connectomics has got a huge amount to add. It's not the only data point, but we think it's a very important incremental data point that, you know, pre-AI, pre-data science, pre the advances in compute power you need to look at 86 billion neurons in a human brain, this was impossible to do.
Chay: Yeah, I've seen some work around like mapping like mammal brains, for instance, and so forth and trying to create this like every single neuron and every single sort of wiring mapped out. And it's obviously taking decades to get to a point of mapping like a square inch, for instance. And how does that work from your perspective then? Is it like a, just a real time map based on a specific area of the brain based on what you need for that specific purpose in that time? Or we're trying to create something more sort of permanent and more model based for future of work, I suppose.
Adam: So it's kind of a bit of all of the above, but yes, there's been a lot of work on fruit flies when you get to the sort of micro-connectome. We're operating at what's called the macro-connectome level. So again, back to the human connectome project, there's in essence eight major networks in the human brain. And there's been times in human history where people thought the whole of the brain was involved in every decision. Then there were times when it was just a a specific sort of anatomical location of the brain was involved. What we now understand, a bit like an orchestra, there are different parts of the brain talking to each other to perform different functions. They're the major connectomics networks. You know, when you get to sort of vision language motor, there were reasonable sort of anatomical markers and pretty good cumulative knowledge about those parts of the brain. But what connectomics really unlocks is those higher cognitive networks, those things that make us human. It's really your soul, your personality, your ability to have emotions, to regulate your emotions, to multitask, to focus when you're ruminating. These are the things that those higher cognitive networks can unlock. And this is where we see just huge potential for connectomics in mental health down the track. So getting sort of granular, the sort of MRI tech, image tech level, there's different types of scan that we take as our source data, there's the classic structural MRI, almost the anatomical MRI where MRIs began. And then you have DTI or tractography, diffusion tensor imaging, was kind of level one mapping that sort of starts to give you that network or track based view of the brain. And really the key unlocker is functional MRI. It's the traffic of the brain. It looks at the blood oxygen levels and you can understand again, start to get some understanding of which parts of the brain are firing, are talking too much, are talking too little and enormously complicated to take even ingest the data from different manufacturers of MRI machines, let alone the machine learning steps you need to kind of make sense of it and present, bite-sized useful chunks to clinicians. I think that's really what Omniscient is doing. As I said, 100,000+ papers in the lab, amazing work being done in connectomics but it's not always necessarily scalable and accessible and easy to digest. It's such a complex field and that's a lot of what we do. We understand the questions that clinicians will be asking and we want to give them the right information in the right form at the right time.
Chay: Yeah, it's amazing. I love that you're, you mentioned mental health a few times there and I've interviewed a few people in the mental health space looking at various different mental health treatments and neurotechs, TMS, TDCS, even like neurofeedback, for instance, as well. what are your sort of thoughts and findings in that space? Owen Muir, for instance, his interview was saying, were starting to appreciate the brain more as like a more mental health, brain health issues as a electricity problem, as opposed to a chemical problem. Is this something you're seeing and you're uncovering maybe within the connectome space?
Adam: Yeah, look, and again, to be clear, we're back to the sort of picks and shovels analogy or the Intel inside of the Microsoft office. We're a platform, we're agnostic to treatments, to providers, to indications. So it's an area of absolute interest for the long term. I would say, Many employees join Omniscient, many investors come on the journey with Omniscient for a whole range of reasons. And we want to build a very commercially robust, a very commercially successful business. But I think mental health is kind of the North Star for a lot of people in the business, both employees and shareholders. So it's very early days in terms of, I guess, change management, particularly in psychiatry. So the way we look at the addressable market, pick a number, it's hard to get very precise data. There's about 10 million brain MRI scans happening in the US every year already. But that doesn't include the 60 million plus people with a diagnosable mental health disorder in the US today. The standard of care in psychiatry today, bizarrely, does not involve studying the organ that is driving the conditions themselves. So having an MRI, doing connectomic analysis, doing a kind of blood test of the brain is currently not part of the workflow. We'd love to get there, but realistically, there's a longer term kind of change management across mental health, across psychiatry to play out. But yeah, we're very supportive of, we want to create a kind of thriving ecosystem around connectomics.
Chay: Yeah, three biggest topics in neurotech I think at the moment are around mental health, neurodegenerative and brain data and neuroethics as well. they're all kind of talk to each other, I suppose, but they seem to be at the hottest areas of change in neurotech right now. And I think everything you've touched on so far has covered those areas. I think historically there's been things like pain management and urology for neuromodulation, so was huge, multi-billion dollar industries, it seems to be changing now. be pointing towards the brain more and more often so really exciting stuff that you've to building.
Adam: It is and again to get one level deeper in terms of our platform we have the FDA cleared clinical areas of our platform but we also have a research module discovery module we're partnering I think we've got 30 plus projects on the go right now that just we're directly involved with and there's many many other institutions utilizing our platform to perform research and yeah, there's some really exciting areas across mental health, across epilepsy, coma, PTSD, OCD, the whole spectrum of brain health challenges and yeah, very happy that we can support that activity.
Chay: Yeah, you mentioned as well like it being agnostic across indications. I always think like founders of businesses often cover, you know, two different buckets. One is very, very scientifically focused, trying to focus on one indication. The other one is building amazing technology and then trying to work out where you can use it afterwards. And they're both equally successful. But I'd love to know about the founders and what their focus was originally and what their backgrounds are and that space really.
Adam: Yeah, so we think we've got the Venn diagram covered in terms of our founders.
Chay: Ha!
Adam: So we've got this sort of AI data science guru and then the neurosurgical neurologist, you know, brain expert. And then our CEO comes from big tech. So we sort of dovetail the commercial expertise to taking SAAS or taking tech into the market, obviously myself supporting from the commercial side. And then the science guys, you know, working their magic. We call them the Lennon and McCartney of the Omniscient Founders team. They dream up the magic in the lab. And then we obviously look at the product market fit and the regulatory environment, the TAMs, the change management workflow. Where can we play? Because it's a nice challenge to have in that, like I said earlier, there are literally dozens of paths, dozens of use cases, this geographic expansion. There's pharma, there's BCI, there's so many areas we can play in, but what is the logical sequence as a startup, bite-sized chunks, you've got to do it sequentially in a sequence that makes sense given capital constraints and just the commercial practicalities of taking something very new and very disruptive into the market.
Chay: Yeah, I often have these conversations with founders from a recruitment perspective or an advisory perspective where people are talking about, we've made this tech, we've made this software, and now here's what it can do. And now we're to put together a pitch deck and start talking about the eight different things it can do. And it's sort of like, let's hone in on one or two things here. Like, what are we trying to solve first of all? And then we can sort of launch other brands to it. So it sounds like you guys have probably encountered that earlier on, like, bloody hell, we can do a lot with this.
Adam: We can do a lot with this and it's not like a consumer app where you can kind of stick it in the app store and literally
Chay: Yeah.
Adam: within hours start monitoring user behavior, user experience, number of downloads. For very understandable and very valid reasons, there are gates and friction points in med. The FDA being the obvious one, but just driving change within the US hospital system is slow and painful and doesn't come easy. So you've got to be very pragmatic about how you navigate those realities. And again, by having one of our founder team, he's personally done thousands of tumor resections, he's worked in the US hospital system. He knows what is gonna work, what is likely to work, what's probably not gonna work. In a slide deck, things can look very easy. In the US hospital system, you hit the wall of reality very quickly.
Chay: Yeah, I've worked with a few sort of disruptive tech companies in the past in like the clinical and surgical setting. it's not that the conversations commercially are often not about whether or how amazing the tech is, it's whether or not you can convince a surgeon who's been doing their job for very long time that they need new technology, which will improve their life, but they've also been very, comfortable in the life they've had using existing technology. Is that something that you guys have come across too, just from adoption of new tech, right?
Adam: I think so. And like any, you know, the early adopter curve is alive, well and kicking, you get those early adopters that jump in very
Chay: Yeah.
Adam: quickly. And then to make it scalable, you've got to get to the, you know, the mainstream majority. And there's a lot of things at play. There is obviously the robust scientific evidence necessary to convince people that they should change their behavior. And again, as much as there are thousands, tens of thousands of papers on Connectomics it is still a relatively new field. And then you've got the pure human resistance to change. You're right. Maybe I'm 20, 25 years into my career, I'm going very well. I'm a brain surgeon, I'm a neurologist. The way I think I've been doing it seems to have been working fine for me. I'm suddenly out of my comfort zone to my AI and machine learning and connectomics. This all sounds very new and scary. Med Ed is our marketing, medical education. We run a forum called the Connectomics Circle where we allowed peers to get together and share knowledge, share best practice, tell their stories. And it's all about driving the research that illustrates the efficacy and the positive economic benefits of adopting new technology.
Chay: that. That's really what it comes down to isn't it? You've to show people in a practical setting rather than trying to sell it to them first of all. I I imagine also as well as the US is sort of the gold standard of commercialization and I see a lot with European clients too and obviously lot of Australian clients. What's that process been like for you guys? Was there a great success in Australia first before coming over to the US or was it just hey let's get into that US hospital system?
Adam: No, look, whilst we are an Australian top co, head office was here, the founders met here, the IP was effectively generated here, we've never really commercially focused on the Australian market in terms of go to market. It's not quite this simple, but if you can crack the US market and become standard of care in the US market. In essence, the world becomes your oyster. I get, you know, of course you could start in Germany or Japan or Brazil or anywhere, but we felt the US was the place to start. We're trying to stay focused. We get approached all the time about opportunities in global markets. And we've dabbled in the early days with, you know, proofs of concept and, research. Obviously, we're open to working with anyone anywhere in the world. But yes, sequentially, we think we want to kind of crack up in the US, hopefully become standard of care in neurosurgical planning. Then we move on to deep brain stimulation and stroke and coma and many other use cases. And we feel once we're truly established as market leader in the US, then yeah, absolutely there is huge global applicability and a global opportunity here for omniscient in in connectomics.
Chay: Yeah, that makes sense. mean, it's often you see companies trying to crack it where they are first and move out, based on what you guys are trying to build and grow in the volume of this, all these procedures and also the money in the US healthcare system too, allows the growth and the expansion of the business elsewhere by focusing on this first of mean, what does the, what's the coding landscape like and the reimbursement landscape, how does it work from that perspective for something like this, which is so new and yeah, quite unique.
Adam: Well, is, I mean, this is part of the complexity of what we do. There's the call it the MRI tech, the image tech, the ingestion of MRI data is no small thing and the analysis and of that. And then there's the pure call it the UX wrap at the software. Like we are a software company as well. We build a SAAS platform happens to be focused on a very complicated field called connectomics. But yeah, so we have data science team, clinical research team, reimbursement team, et cetera. But of course, just a standard engineering capability as well. So there's the AI aspect in terms of what's baked into the product and kind of intrinsic to Connectomics itself. And then like all companies around the world, we're embracing AI in terms of just whole of company productivity, whether that's sales, marketing, med-ed, customer success, finance, legal, HR across the business, but definitely in coding, they've been very quick to jump on. the AI capabilities to improve their productivity. Reimbursement's an interesting one. So I mentioned we've got two FDA clearances, which is kind of your table stakes and a huge lift to get there, a huge sort of credibility bill to get those clearances and build the foundations of the platform. But reimbursement is what you need to truly kind of oil the wheels of commerce and scale. you need reimbursement and very exciting news just in calendar 2026, the first Category III CPT code 1039T insight for Connectomic analysis was approved that by the AMA. So category III is more a tracking of activity as opposed to having a payment associated with it, but an absolutely massively important strategic symbolic marker on the road to a category one, which is where the payment So getting acknowledgement that Connectomic insight over and above generating an MRI, call it a 2D standard picture MRI, yeah, that was already happening for many decades, to have Connectomic analysis recognized as part of the workflow is a hugely, hugely symbolic moment. So again, one of the many things in a medtech or really any startup business, those projects you have to work on that are under the bonnet. They don't necessarily generate revenue this quarter, next quarter, or even this year, but massively important sort of foundational steps if you're trying to build a scale global business.
Chay: Yeah, it doesn't sound like I'm underplaying it, but you do have to start somewhere, right? It's that first step in the right direction. And I think every
Adam: Correct.
Chay: technology now that we take for granted, any sort of imaging or even surgical tool, for instance, at some point started there as an observed technology. So really exciting. What's the competition
Adam: Yeah. Yep.
Chay: landscape look like for you guys in the US now? You guys are definitely ahead of the curve. I've been tracking you guys for a while. I the US team, but what's it looking like from a competition?
Adam: Yeah, good question. Kind of as ever, it depends how you define the TAM or the addressable market we're going after. Clearly, there's a range of tools addressing a range of neurological disorders. But in terms of call it mapping solutions, we definitely feel like we are the market leader, back to without getting too inside baseball on image tech, DTI. call it entry level mapping, was around before Omniscient. So it's not to say there were no brain maps before we launched our Quicktome platform. But again, a good analogy one of our founders talks about is DTI. It's not useless by any extent of the imagination, but it's like looking at a map of a city and the highway is given the same prominence as the laneway behind your house and the high street in the village. It's just a massive information and visually incredibly captivating. If people want to Google DTI maps, it looks amazing. But as a clinical user, short of time, needing bite-sized chunks of utility and information wasn't very helpful. And we've sort of taken that to the next level. And that's where you get groupings into networks and you can analyze the traffic on those networks. So in terms of A broad-based Connectomics platform, I think we're really the only game in town. There are other mapping solutions. We'd consider our tech to be of a superior, know, detailed granularity insight generation. And back to the sort of platform, there are some point solutions that utilize Connectomics, but it would be a single kind of like a TMS, you know, a bundle of hardware and software with a TMS manufacturer for a single indication like treatment resistant depression. We want a thriving ecosystem. We want people to succeed in the field of connectomics, but again, they're making very sort of narrow bets, almost kind of biotech in nature. It's either a home run or it's a strike out and pack up your bags. And we're trying to take a sort of more horizontal view and let a thousand flowers bloom on our platform.
Chay: Yeah, competition's good, right? But I think being the first one into the market with the most advanced technology, there's also a pressure as well, isn't there, to maintain innovation and to keep growing, but by being so ahead of the curve in such a niche market and having this big vision already, which is great, because I think a lot of early stage businesses enter a market with a really narrow vision of I'm going to become the expert in this, but I think you guys have this like, can do all of this stuff. It's really exciting.
Adam: Yeah, look, broader than Neurotech and broader than Connectomics being a first mover, I would think overall is a very good thing. But it's, you know, there's pros and cons of everything. I mentioned medical education and the marketing burden to educate the field as the first mover. And, you know, arguably a lot of our med-ed effort and kind of knowledge transfer of best practice can lift the entire field of Connectomics. Right now we're the market leader and we back ourselves to stay there. So others can benefit from that, but there is a big lift in med being the first in any field because again, when you walk in the door and even the most expert of neurosurgeon or neurologist or stroke practitioner, often will be starting at ground zero in terms of their knowledge of Connectomics. I think that's starting to change. I mean, we're now six years into that and we are now starting to notice as we walk in the room, people going, no, you don't have to convince me of the field of Connectomics. I'm there. Let's talk more specifically. But it's been a long road to get here.
Chay: Yeah, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's bloody difficult to get this product in front of people, isn't it? To build them and then get it in front of the right people. mean, tell me just quickly then, because I do want to ask about your podcast too, but tell me about where you are now as a business and what the plans are for 27, 28, 29, what you think the growth looks like.
Adam: Yeah, look, the first six, you know, overnight success after seven years of grind, even to get where we are today has been a long patient lift and Med always works, it works slower than you'd like to, especially if you've been in other fields in direct to consumer and back to, you know, apps in the app store that can, you know, pop very quickly. It takes a grind. You've got to build trust. You've got to build credibility. We've done that. We've built the foundations. We've now got around 100 paying customers in the US across hospitals and clinics. So we're hitting some very impressive milestones given, yeah, we'd always like to do more, but in the med world, we're actually moving pretty quickly. We concluded a Series D fundraise in December of 2025. We'd been backed by some wonderful high-net-worth and family office investors for the first kind of six years of our journey. brought in a couple of institutional investors, so Australian based venture capital investors, including the NRF, the government effectively, know, innovation fund for Australia. So that's given us an absolute, important milestone on the journey. But yeah, it's all about, nobody rings the bell when you go from startup to scale up, but I would say we're now moving to the kind of scale up phase rather than the raw kind of land grab. market development, get some runs on the board. We're now getting to a point where we're looking at scaling. Obviously, I talked about expanding across more use cases in the US and starting to think about even broader fields like BCI and pharma and whole body scanning. There's a whole range of areas we think we can go into as well as overseas. It's mapping out the next phases and let's see where we can get to.
Chay: Well, it really, really excited to watch. And I've obviously been tracking you guys for a while and that raise was huge. And I'm always seeing new hires being announced. It's great to see, but I would like to ask you, maybe as a final set of questions around your own podcast, The Business of Neurotech. I mean, it's been fantastic to watch it. I think it launched around the same time as my first episode came out. And this has been awesome to see the guests you'd be getting on. What was the inspiration behind starting that?
Adam: I've always thought, again, as a new field, I'm a big fan of podcasts, firstly, just as a consumer when I'm running, when I'm traveling, when I'm doing anything. I love the multitask aspect of podcasting. You can always be listening. I love the fact that you can get any subject matter expert in their field in such a niche way and listen in an in-depth manner to podcasts. I've always been a fan of the medium. I always thought there was an opportunity in ConnecTomics to take a kind of business view of the world. It's quite interesting. There's many clinical kind of focus podcasts, whether it's the research, the science. But as I started to look for that intersection of the business of Neurotech, it seemed to be strangely void. It's like, there's a million plus podcasts. Surely there must be a couple of dozen around the world. But
Chay: Mmm.
Adam: I asked some people that I trust that are very active in the field and there didn't seem to be one. So I thought, yeah. With the fundraise done, know, sort of a little bit of a release to pursue some of these kind of, you know, thought leadership and industry conversation type processes. So yeah, I just thought I'd give it a go. I'm a dozen podcasts in now. I'm going on a fortnightly rhythm and so far so good. I mean, it's got to be a passion project if you're a podcaster, because I think that
Chay: Yeah.
Adam: eventually you will run out of steam if you're doing it purely as kind of some, you know, top of funnel business idea. You've got to kind of want to do it. as I regularly say to my guests, I would very happily have spent the last 45 minutes having this conversation. We just happened to have recorded it. It's just kind of two people that
Chay: Yeah.
Adam: work in the industry that's still relatively new in the bigger scheme of things. And we're all kind of working it out together. And there are some absolutely just brilliant minds focused on on Neurotech. I've been lucky already to have some of them on the podcasts and yeah, look forward to continuing it.
Chay: Yeah, it's great isn't it? To people within the Neurotech industry, there's obviously lots of conversation to happen all the time about what the exciting new technologies are, what the different things are that are kicking off all the time. But the reality is that outside of it, there's not really much knowledge about what the hell's going on. So it's really, really interesting to listen to yours and to hear the unique perspective of the investment community, the CEOs and so forth. And obviously as a CFO and a COO yourself, you have a unique perspective on that too. So what are the, if you could say like one or two of the really, really unique things that you've learned from those interviews? is that maybe you weren't expecting from the podcast that gave you a unique perspective.
Adam: Yeah, no, looks a good question, Chay. I mean, everyone has brought such a different field. I try and get a blend of founders, investors and analysts. Everyone brings a slightly different lens to the same kind of core set of challenges. What's been interesting is that BCI has come up, I think, in every single podcast, whether or not I intentionally try and steer the conversation that way or otherwise. So that's clearly kind of the hot topic in terms of momentum and volume of capital and deal flow and just, guess, attention outside the Neurotech community, it seems to be starting to cut through Elon Musk, Neuralink, and now just so many other startups coming into that space. The Importance of BCI has been one thing that's kind of come back at me, but I think the relative newness of the sector. is coming through because when you're inside the tent and you feel like everything's Neurotech and then you sort of put the volume of capital that's coming in and compare it to AI, large language models, data centers and many other areas, you realize sort of how small we are in the bigger scheme of things. But I'm very bullish on the sector. I really do believe in 10 years time, this will be an investment class in its own right. There'll be specialist Neurotech funds or at the very least, certainly the big boys in Silicon Valley will be, yeah, they're already starting to play predominantly in BCI, but I think they'll all increase their exposure to Neurotech over time.
Chay: Yeah, I completely agree. I think there's this lot of little bubbles emerging all the time and also existing technologies that are evolving and allowing greater patient access like we touch on TMS. Now that a few years ago was just two or three of the big players and yet it was in clinic procedures and now it's one day programs. And also, yeah, BCI and the Brain Foundation model market that's emerging outside of that. Super interesting. I think we're on the verge. I feel like this year feels a bit a turning point, I think, with some of the investments we're seeing and also the international investments and I'm writing something about Chinese Neurotech and in August I've seen about 12 headlines which is crazy so watch this space and that one mate but yeah but look Adam I really appreciate your time thank you so much I know that the time zones are a bit bonkers but I do appreciate the efforts
Adam: No worries. Thank you for hosting me. Great conversation. Thanks, Chay.
Chay: Cheers.
