Chennai-based Neurostellar, has raised angel investment of over $150,000 from a group of angels including Ather Energy ’s co-founders Swapnil Jain and Tarun Mehta. The deep-tech start-up is also in the midst of raising another funding round of around $1 million.

Incubated at the IIT-Madras Incubation Cell, Neurostellar is developing smart brain-machine interface for tracking and decoding one’s mental fitness. Their flagship product, Orbit, is a smart headband that combines EEG (Electroencephalography) for brain activity and PPG (Photoplethysmography) for heart rate and breathing patterns to provide a real-time insights into stress, focus, and mental fatigue. No diagnosis made with the device.

Neurostellar is co-founded by Karthik Raghavendran and Dhanushya Sree, both biotech graduates of SASTRA in 2019.

Unlike wearable tech that are engaged in 24*7 tracking, Orbit is built for intentional use and is best used during key moments like deep work, meditation, or recovery to get cognitive data, co-founder Raghavendran said. “The product was used by a batch of 25 paid users in the first cohort last year, and this was also followed by a Letter of Intent for 30 devices purchased from the Indian Air Force (IAF),” he added.

Interestingly, the start-up has also refined its smart headgear since then, and in the new cohort of users, it has signed an MoU with a leading chess coach, who is set to make chess players use it. Neurostellar is shipping 60 numbers of our product, which includes 10 chess grandmasters testing out Orbit, Raghavendran said.

Like other deep tech hardware start-ups, Neurostellar has also been supported by grants such as those by Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), and others in its early years.

Published on May 12, 2025