An update on where I’ve been, what I’m focused on now, and where neurotech, mental health, and longevity are headed

Hey, it’s been a while…

To everyone who’s stuck with me since my last post back in December, thank you. I owe you an explanation and an update.

The honest reason it’s taken this long is finding the time to write again. I used to treat writing as non-negotiable, squeezing it into an already packed schedule. Since December, I finished my MBA at NYU (officially done as of this past January), and you’d think that would free up hours for the blog. Instead, I used that time to reconnect with family and friends. The people and moments I’d put on hold while grinding through business school and making a career pivot toward becoming a full-time investor. That felt like the right trade to make.

The pivot itself has eaten up the rest of my time. In September 2025, I joined Qapita, a Singapore-based, Series B equity management and fund administration platform, as Partnerships Manager in NYC. Outside of work hours, I’ve spent most of my free time getting fluent in cap tables, employee equity, and fund services. This is knowledge that I think is essential groundwork for the investor and, eventually, the fund manager I want to become.

And then there’s NeuroNYC, where I serve as Head of Investor Partnerships in my spare time, learning directly from the GPs building New York City’s neurotech ecosystem. Next month brings our second annual NeuroTech Summit on July 21 — last year, we fit the entire event into a single conference room. This year, thanks to how much the community and our audience have grown, we’ve moved to a much larger (and more expensive) venue.

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Join us: the first-ever GP/LP Happy Hour

NeuroNYC GP/LP Happy Hour 📅 July 20 — the night before the Summit 🎯 Open to investors active in neurotech, mental health, BCI, brain health, and neurodegenerative disease — and to any investor curious about expanding into these spaces. Emerging Managers welcome; attendance is subject to vetting. 🔗 RSVP: lu.ma/qlytyu5m

This one’s personal for me! Many of the GPs investing in neurotech and mental health in this city have become mentors and close friends of mine, and I want more people to have access to that same network. The goal of this event is simple: a good night, real conversations with neurotech/mental health investors, a clearer view of where this ecosystem is headed, and relationships that turn into follow-up meetings. If it goes well, I’d love for this to grow into a recurring series, or at minimum, become the one investor meetup people circle on their calendar every year.

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What I want to accomplish in the next few years

My goal is to raise my own fund within the next couple of years, and everything I’m doing right now is in service of that. Through NeuroNYC, I’m spending time with as many GPs and LPs as I can, asking what matters most to them today, what’s changed since they started investing, what they wish had gone differently, and where they want to deploy capital next. That’s the raw material my thesis is built from.

I’m also learning the less glamorous side of running a fund: fund formation, fund administration, fund services — through conversations with law firms around the city and GPs who’ve done it, plus what I see day-to-day at Qapita.

Track record matters too, so the near-term plan is to start writing angel checks and investing in syndicates, possibly as an LP in someone else’s fund before I raise my own. Either way, building the thesis comes first.

What I’m focused on right now

My thesis is forming around three areas: AI-driven diagnostics and personalized medicine, mental health, and longevity. I run everything through one filter: does this improve detection, personalization, or access? If a company can’t move the needle on at least one of those, I’m less interested.

Some of what follows is already close to real-world adoption (consumer EEG wearables, for instance); some is still mostly research (most brain-disease biomarker work). Figuring out which is which — and which categories eventually become standard care versus a niche demo — is most of the work right now.

AI diagnostics and personalized medicine

At its simplest: using data to catch problems earlier and to pick the right treatment for the right person instead of one-size-fits-all care. This isn’t far off. Researchers are actively testing whether biomarkers pulled from tears, retinal scans, and EEG can flag Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s risk earlier than traditional testing allows.

A favorite example for explaining this to non-investors: Texas A&M researchers are building an AI “digital human” that interviews patients while reading facial expressions, response timing, and biometric signals to detect apathy — often one of the earliest, subtlest signs of dementia, and one that’s easy to miss in a 15-minute doctor’s visit.

My venture take: the companies that win here won’t be the ones with the most impressive research paper. They’ll be the ones who can move a promising model into a validated clinical workflow that doctors trust, and that insurers will actually pay for.

Why mental health belongs in this conversation

Mood, sleep, motivation, and apathy aren’t separate from neurodegeneration, but they’re often its earliest signals. The same measurement tools making mental health care more personalized may end up being the tools that catch brain disease before it’s obvious.

This part is personal for me. Over the past year-plus, I’ve worked seriously on my own mental health by paying close attention to my biometric data, getting to the gym and walking more, eating better and more consistently (if you see me around the city with a lunchbox, now you know why), and starting medication for anxiety, something that quietly held me back academically, professionally, and personally for years. I heard something at an NYU Bio Labs panel last year from Greg Kubin, GP at PsyMed Ventures, that’s stuck with me ever since: living longer doesn’t mean much if you’re not living well. Longevity without happiness kind of misses the point.

BCI: non-invasive now, invasive later

Brain-computer interfaces are having a real moment, and it’s worth separating the near-term story from the long-term one. Near-term, this is about wearables: at CES 2026, EEG sleep headbands and earbuds were everywhere, and Naqi’s neural earbuds, which let users control devices with subtle facial gestures rather than brain implants, won a CES Innovation Award. Neurable, a non-invasive BCI startup, is now looking to license its tech directly into consumer wearables.

Long term, this is about implants, and the field just had a landmark year. In March, China’s NMPA approved Neuracle’s NEO device (the world’s first commercially approved invasive BCI) for patients with paralysis from spinal cord injury, beating Neuralink to that particular milestone. Meanwhile, Columbia, Stanford, and Penn researchers unveiled a single silicon-chip implant that’s a fraction of the size and complexity of current devices, and Neuralink has said it’s targeting high-volume production this year.

My read: non-invasive BCIs reach regular consumers first; invasive systems likely deliver the biggest medical breakthroughs, just on a longer timeline, unfortunately.

The real BCI question: can it scale?

The harder problem here isn’t the science but everything around it. BCIs are difficult to prove in trials, difficult to get regulators comfortable with, and difficult to scale. No BCI is commercially available in the U.S. yet, partly because regulators don’t have a clean framework for a device that improves function without “curing” anything, which makes defining trial success genuinely hard.

That’s also the opportunity. Whoever solves usability, reimbursement, and clearly demonstrated clinical outcomes (not just the underlying neuroscience) could end up owning a foundational platform. As an investor, that’s the lens I apply: the next winners will probably be those who solve the science and adoption problems at the same time.

Longevity as the umbrella

I don’t think of longevity as a separate wellness trend. I think of it as the layer connecting everything above: prevention, diagnostics, brain health, and aging well. In 2026, that’s becoming more visible: early brain-screening partnerships are expanding access to neurodegeneration risk detection, the first human senolytic trials targeting Alzheimer’s are reporting early, preliminary results, and clinics are shifting from reactive sick care toward proactive, biological-age-tracked longevity care.

To me, longevity is less about living forever and more about staying functional longer. That’s exactly where these three areas converge: AI diagnostics catch disease earlier, BCI changes how we interact with our own nervous systems, and longevity asks how we preserve brain and body function over time. All three point toward the same goal > proactive medicine instead of reactive medicine. I’d bet the highest-value companies end up sitting at the intersections: continuous brain monitoring, early detection paired directly with intervention. My long-term stretch belief is that the “phone of the future” looks less like a gadget and more like an extension of the brain itself.

What I’ll be watching next

A few signals I’ll be tracking over the next few months: clinical validation, regulatory progress, reimbursement pathways, real-world usability, and whether products move from novelty to daily habit. I’m watching for the companies that turn brain science into everyday infrastructure. Not just the ones that make headlines.

One ask

If there’s someone you think I should talk to, an LP or GP whose brain I should pick (pun intended), a newsletter I should be reading, or even just blunt feedback on anything above…good, bad, or ugly… I’d genuinely appreciate it. And thank you again for being part of this with me.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely my own and do not reflect the views, positions, or strategies of Qapita or NeuroNYC.