Whether you're a founder, aspiring entrepreneur, investor or startup enthusiast, this fireside chat series provides you with honest, insightful looks into how our community of visionaries are building life-changing products and companies.
During this session, we hear from the minds behind C. Light Technologies, the award-winning neuro-tech and AI startup revolutionizing the way we detect, monitor, and treat Alzheimer's, MS, and other central nervous system conditions.
Founders Dr. Christy Sheehy and Dr. Joe Xing share each step of their startup journey, from developing a novel technology, raising funding, to building their team and so much more. Don't miss this opportunity to talk shop, and get the insights you need to be successful in this industry.
Boston-based C. Light Technologies, Inc. is a neurotech and artificial intelligence company that tracks retinal (back of the eye/front of brain) movements less than 1/100th of a human hair. With their own proprietary scanning laser ophthalmoscope--the “Retitrack”--C. Light analyzes miniature eye movements with AI, a very different approach to eye tracking from other technologies on the market which measure pupil movement. C. Light’s device is 120x more accurate than pupil trackers sold commercially today and 1000x more than webcams and phone cameras. The scan takes 10 seconds with no dilation or patient discomfort required.
C. Light’s biomarker platform could transform how we assess neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis, as well as brain injuries such as concussions, allowing for early detection (when more treatment options could be available), and more objective ways to measure if therapies are working or not.
Dr. Sheehy is an award winning entrepreneur and healthcare innovator with >15 years of technical entrepreneurial expertise in the optical & ophthalmic engineering realm, numerous scientific publications / invited presentations and lectures, and direct clinical research experience with neurodegenerative patient populations at the top research institutions of UC Berkeley and UCSF. She is the Founder/CEO of C. Light Technologies, Inc. - a neurotech and AI startup with the big vision to impact neurological health assessments via the eye. Dr. Sheehy successfully acted as the Principal Investigator for three NIH SBIR/STTR grants - a Phase I grant entitled, “Retinal eye-tracking as a diagnostic tool for traumatic brain injury and concussion,” with a recent follow on Phase II grant for $2.25M, and a Phase I STTR grant investigating fixational eye motion as a prognostic and monitoring tool for multiple sclerosis. She has successfully brought in >$7M from venture capital, angel, and grant funding to her organization to date.
Adam O'Donnell runs Startup Partnerships for North America at Zendesk. Previously he worked as an investment associate at a Silicon Valley VC (investors in Airbnb, Amplitude, etc.), where we reviewed 2000+ high-growth startups. Before investing, Adam founded 2x B2B SaaS companies (1 exit, 1 failed). Adam lives in San Francisco, and in his free time runs a podcast called TheTop.VC, where he has interviewed VCs from Mayfield, 500 Startups, Techstars, and more.
Dr. Joe Xing is a Stanford University- and CERN-trained physicist and technologist who has a unique background in theoretical physics, deep learning, and AI, particularly subatomic particle decay asymmetries, eye-motion brain encoding, and behavioral imitation in self-driving vehicles. Dr. Joe Xing is a serial entrepreneur with an insatiable curiosity for nature's fundamentals and interworking’s and how technology can help optimize everyday life.
Dr. Joe Xing’s career trajectory has been unique from the start: Dr. Joe Xing was Lead AI Scientist at an early-stage EV startup turned multi-billion-dollar unicorn, led as Director of AI and Autonomous Driving at a long-established German brand car manufacturer, and has since co-founded multiple startups with some selected by Y Combinator. Currently Dr. Joe Xing is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder at C. Light Technologies, Inc — a Neurotech and AI startup company aiming to develop solutions for the eye-brain connection for prognostic and preventative care in neurology and beyond. Our vision is to help people and change the healthcare for better influencing hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
