We want brain–computer interfaces to be boring.
Boring like a keyboard: something you use all day and never think about. That’s what we’re building, a headset and the AI models behind it, with no surgery. We started in 2025 and we’re backed by Y Combinator.
Why we’re doing this
We met freshman year of high school, and we’ve been working together ever since: as founding engineers at Syntra, and now at Dydema. Chris got into neurotech visiting Julian at Longhorn Neurotech in Austin, where Julian shaved his head for an experiment.
BCIs have worked in labs for decades. They just never really left. This year our models started working on people they’d never seen, after a short setup. That happened way faster than we expected.
We don’t want it to be medical, or something you need surgery for. It picks up what you mean to do on a computer, like pressing a key. It doesn’t read your thoughts or feelings. You put it on, use it, and take it off.
Julian
Julian does the neuroscience. He’s done every step himself, from fitting electrodes to training models, and he’s built teams that do it.
- Before
- Co-founded Longhorn Neurotech at UT Austin, and grew it past 200 members
- Founding engineer at Syntra (YC S24)
- Research
- Led EEG neurodata teams at Longhorn Neurotech
- fMRI interpretability @ the Dynamic Medical Image Computing lab, UT Austin
- Hands on
- The full neurodata lifecycle. Electrode placement through to training models
- Prototype hardware, firmware, and the signal-processing pipeline
Chris
Chris builds the models and everything they run on. Before Dydema he worked on AI for problems with barely any data.
- Before
- Structures in Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Houston
- Founding engineer at Syntra (YC S24)
- Research
- Deep learning including graph RAG and embodied AI
- Modelling in sparse-data domains
- Hands on
- Backend, API and ML/LLM infrastructure
- Production AI systems and security
The particulars
- Founded
- 2025
- Based
- San Francisco, CA
- Backed by
- Y Combinator F26