January 28, 2025
Dear EMOTIV Community,
As we kick off the new year, I want to take a moment to reflect on the journey we’ve been on together, the progress we’ve made, and the exciting opportunities that lie ahead.
This represents the first of what will hopefully be many annual letters to the EMOTIV community, spanning our customers, institutional partners, government and civil society interlocutors, and other curious minds who take an interest in what we’re building.
This year marks a unique inflection point in our journey—a moment when the stars are starting to align between our company’s capabilities and the rapid, intersecting advances in AI, the cloud, and neurotechnology. With these positive headwinds behind us, we are poised to accelerate the realization of our mission: democratizing neurotechnology and bringing our understanding of the human brain closer to everyone, everywhere.
How We Got Here
I’m struck by how far we’ve come since our founding in 2011. When we started, access to EEG technology was confined to clinical settings, and real-time brain measurement in everyday contexts—at an affordable price—was uncharted territory.
This is the problem we set out to solve: pioneering cloud-based, wireless EEG technology so that researchers and individuals alike could measure brain activity and collaborate in real-world environments—whether at work, under stress, in peak performance, or at different phases of life and personal health. People are used to wearing smartwatches and other wearables that monitor heart rate, sleep, and step count, but what about getting feedback on the most important organ in their body—the human brain?
Our initial focus was on developing the right hardware form factors to obtain high-quality data and insights from an inherently noisy EEG signal. This was no trivial task, and it took the first several years of our company’s existence to perfect.
Once we were confident in the measurement quality and scientific credibility of our hardware, we redoubled our efforts to build companion software that was intuitive, easy to use, and enabled individuals to share insights and collaborate on projects over the cloud in real time. Over the years, these elements coalesced into widespread adoption, with hundreds of thousands of users in more than 150 countries.
We also foresaw that as adoption grew and our global user base matured, we could leverage this expanding dataset to establish trend lines and derive inferences using sophisticated AI/ML tools. Just as large language models grow exponentially more capable with increased training data, the same logic applies to EEG signals from the brain.
We provided EMOTIV users with the opportunity to share their data—de-identified and privacy-protected—to help build a global dataset that benefits the entire research and user community. Thanks to our users’ contributions and long-term commitment, EMOTIV now maintains the world’s largest dataset of EEG data from the brain.
Where We Are Now and Why We’re Excited
Today, we stand ready to seize this moment of opportunity and scale our impact, with a strong product foundation in place, a dedicated team of domain experts, and a range of use cases supported by our products that span consumer, research, and clinical needs.
Below are a few key lines of effort we’ve focused on in the past year:
Scaling the Business and Broadening Our Consumer Reach
Over the past few years, we’ve built a strong foundation in the research space, fueling both innovation and growth in neurotechnology. Building on that momentum, we’re now expanding our consumer offerings to bring our products to a wider audience. Our evolving portfolio—from the MW20 headset to Emotiv Studio, the Emotiv App, and a growing gaming platform—reflects a balanced approach that supports both research and everyday needs.
Meanwhile, initiatives like improved marketing, a more user-friendly website, and seamless payment options are helping us create a more accessible, customer-focused experience. By staying committed to continuous innovation, adaptability, and user satisfaction, we’re setting the stage for sustainable growth and inviting more people to discover the power of neurotechnology.
Launching the New Emotiv App
The official public release of the Emotiv App marked a significant leap forward in personal cognitive insights. This innovation builds on our extensive EEG dataset, amassed over years of research. The dataset underpins robust cognitive detection algorithms, granting users unprecedented insights into their own brain activity. Designed for daily use, the app helps track cognitive states such as stress, focus, and overall brain performance, equipping everyone with tools to better understand, improve, and optimize their mental wellness.
Empowering Our Developer Ecosystem
We launched our developer ecosystem, providing robust resources and support so innovators can build solutions on the EMOTIV platform. Through targeted updates and strategic initiatives—including a revamped developer website, streamlined licensing processes, and SDK enhancements for consumer device support, advanced tools, and automated licensing—we’ve made it easier than ever for developers to leverage our technology. We also introduced new educational resources and a flexible licensing model to foster a collaborative community. Building on EMOTIV’s leadership in EEG technology, these efforts spark the imagination of technical audiences and shape the next generation of neurotech solutions.
Building the First Foundation Model for the Brain
By harnessing advanced AI and our unparalleled EEG dataset, we are uncovering patterns and insights that promise to redefine brain health monitoring and intervention. Over the past year, we have made considerable progress in developing our Foundation Model, emphasizing rigorous artifact removal, performance optimization, and the integration of diverse datasets. A distributed training approach successfully reduced training time by 25%, while improvements to EEG2Rep remedied mixed performance outcomes and boosted overall accuracy.
In parallel, we expanded our dataset to include Alzheimer’s data and meticulously replicated key findings from major EEG research papers, validating our framework’s robustness. We also embarked on exploring a novel “Mamba” architecture, which has demonstrated higher accuracy, a smaller memory footprint, and faster training times for edge deployment compared to EEG2Rep. Our large-scale training initiatives included multitask training, yielding marked improvements in both epilepsy and attention tasks, with further artifact removal efforts underway on larger medical datasets. Through these multifaceted advancements, we continue charting a new frontier in computational neuroscience—one that could significantly enhance our ability to understand, prevent, and treat a range of brain-related conditions.
Expanding Strategic Partnerships
Our strategic partnerships showcase a strong commitment to fostering long-term relationships and broadening our global impact. We have consistently delivered sustained value for enterprise clients, forging renewed engagements that reinforce trust in our offerings. Meanwhile, collaborations with world-class institutions—such as the University of San Francisco —underscore our pivotal role in advancing research and clinical applications. Collectively, these alliances bolster our standing as a trusted leader in neurotechnology and pave the way for broader adoption of our solutions across both consumer and enterprise markets.
Ethical Leadership
In an era of rapid technological change, one constant is EMOTIV’s unwavering commitment to helping individuals understand their brains and using technology as a force for good. We strive to lead the industry in ethical stewardship, privacy, regulatory compliance, and policy engagement. Our three-pronged approach involves adhering to stringent global standards, educating and empowering our community beyond mere legal requirements, and working constructively with government and civil society to shape regulations that safeguard users while enabling continuous innovation. Over the past year, we have contributed to neuroethics initiatives led by UNESCO, OECD, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Neurorights Foundation, and numerous leading research universities.
What’s Next
Looking ahead over the next five to ten years, I envision a world where neurotechnology is as commonplace as ECG monitoring in smartwatches. We are on the cusp of understanding how brain health affects quality of life across the lifespan. Our work on foundation models and AI/machine learning is unlocking patterns that could help prevent cognitive decline, manage stress, and even customize learning experiences.
Here are a few of my priorities for 2025:
Expanding Access, Applications, and Engagement: We will continue investing in and strengthening our core technologies to ensure intuitive, robust, and affordable solutions that broaden the reach of neurotechnology. By collaborating with partners on new research and enterprise use cases, we’ll push the boundaries of what’s possible. Simultaneously, we’ll maintain a steadfast focus on education and ethical stewardship, fostering trust and driving adoption across diverse sectors.
Advancing the Foundation Model for the Brain: Building on our unparalleled dataset, we will continue refining a foundation model that enables us to study healthy brain activity and identify early markers of cognitive decline, laying the groundwork for groundbreaking progress in brain health.
Elevating MW20 and Our Consumer Experience: Following our successful CES launch, we are committed to further enhancing MW20, the Emotiv App, and Emotiv Play to deliver meaningful, real-world brain insights. We also reaffirm our focus on expanding our developer ecosystem to broaden and diversify what consumers can do with this technology, unlocking new possibilities for everyday life. By listening to our community and prioritizing continuous innovation, we aim to offer a more immersive, intuitive experience that underscores our mission of bringing the power of neurotechnology to everyone.
EMOTIV’s mission has always been rooted in long-term, sustainable impact. We remain dedicated to being a trusted leader in neurotechnology—grounded in science, committed to ethics, and focused on empowering people worldwide.
To our customers, partners, and team members: thank you for your trust, your contributions, and your shared belief in what we are building. Together, we are not only advancing technology but shaping a future where brain health and understanding are within everyone’s reach.
Here’s to another year of growth, discovery, and meaningful impact.
Warm regards,
Tan Le
CEO, EMOTIV
