Applied Brain Research did not materialize out of a pitch deck and a caffeine spike. This company traces back to 2013, deep inside the University of Waterloo, where Dr. Chris Eliasmith spent more than a decade doing something unfashionable in tech: studying how brains actually work before trying to commercialize intelligence. That work produced the Neural Engineering Framework, Nengo, Semantic Pointer Architecture, and a conviction that AI should think locally, not phone home for permission.
That long arc bent into an oversubscribed seed round of over $3.6M, led by Two Small Fish Ventures. Eva Lau joins the board, bringing a sharp blend of AI, semiconductor, and venture discipline to a company that already proved it could survive without hype capital. This is the first disclosed institutional round, which tells you everything about how much validation Applied Brain Research demanded from itself before asking the market to believe.
The leadership team reads like a research lab that learned how to ship. Dr. Chris Eliasmith as CTO. Dr. Travis DeWolf running operations with a researcher’s backbone. Dr. Daniel Rasmussen driving software and compilers where theory meets deployment. Dr. Trevor Bekolay translating computational neuroscience into production reality. Dr. Xuan Choo anchoring research and board governance. Kevin Conley as CEO brings 30+ years of semiconductor scar tissue from SanDisk, Western Digital, and Everspin, where physics, yield, and margins are not academic concepts.
The TSP1 chip is where the story stops being polite. Full vocabulary speech recognition on a single chip. Sub 35 ms latency. Under 30 mW. No cloud dependency. No privacy gymnastics. State space models and the Legendre Memory Unit doing what transformer-heavy stacks struggle to do when power, heat, and cost actually matter. ASR, TTS, DSP, biosignal inference, all streaming like cognition instead of buffering like content.
This tech is aimed squarely at friction points: AR glasses that cannot afford lag, robots that cannot wait for connectivity, wearables that count milliwatts, medical devices that protect data by default, vehicles that need answers when the signal disappears. Developer kits are live. Partners across AR, robotics, wearables, medical, and automotive are engaged. CES noticed. Canada’s Semiconductor Council noticed.
This $3.6M+ seed is not a starting line. It is a volume knob turning up on a decade of disciplined work. Brains do not brute force reality. They optimize, compress, and respond in real time. Applied Brain Research seems to have built a business around that simple, inconvenient truth.
