Founder Stack

For decades, diagnosing mental health and neurological conditions has depended more on interpretation than evidence. Conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injuries often leave doctors relying on behavioural assessments and prolonged observation before a diagnosis can be made. The process is slow, subjective, and for patients already navigating complex conditions, frequently exhausting. Closing that gap requires the kind of deep, research-backed innovation that theMinistry of Education'sBharat Innovates 2026initiative is designed to find and amplify. The event, to be held in Nice, France, from 14 to 16 June 2026 as part of the India-France Year of Innovation, will bring around 120 R&D-backed Indian ventures across 13 frontier sectors before global investors, industry leaders, and policymakers, with the goal of opening real pathways into France, Europe, and beyond. India's ability to produce this kind of innovation is itself a story in progress. Reforms under the National Education Policy 2020, international research collaborations through SPARC, and the Study in India programme have collectively strengthened what Indian institutions produce and who they attract. The results are visible in how Indian universities have climbed global rankings, with institutions like IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, and IISc Bengaluru all rising significantly in recent years, and India is now among the fastest-growing higher education systems in the G20. It is from this ecosystem that some of the country's most ambitious healthcare innovators are emerging. Among them is Bengaluru-basedBrainSightAI, a company focused on transforming how mental health conditions and brain disorders are diagnosed, understood, and treated. Founded in 2019 by CEOLaina Emmanueland CTODr Rimjhim Agrawal, BrainSightAI is building AI-powered brain mapping technology designed to help neurologists, psychiatrists, and neurosurgeons make more informed clinical decisions, while also creating a more empathetic and privacy-focused support system for patients. At the centre of BrainSightAI is VoxelBox, an AI and ML-based neuroimaging platform that creates personalised brain maps using resting-state fMRI, one of the few imaging techniques capable of capturing whole-brain connectivity. Radiologists upload an MRI scan to the platform, and within an hour, VoxelBox generates a detailed three-dimensional map of the patient's brain, combining signal processing, neuroimaging, artificial intelligence, and cloud technology into a single clinical tool. These maps give neurosurgeons, psychiatrists, and neurologists a connectomic view of the brain's functional and structural networks. In practical terms, this allows doctors to diagnose conditions with greater precision, plan surgeries while reducing risk to critical functions such as language and emotion, and monitor how patients respond to treatment over time. While AI in healthcare is often framed around automation and efficiency, Br