Beacon Biosignals Raises $86m To Advance At-Home EEG and Sleep Biomarkers

At-home EEG has long been treated as a peripheral tool, useful for sleep tracking or wellness, but rarely taken seriously in shaping clinical decisions. The limitation is less the signal itself than the lack of a reliable way to collect it at scale in daily life. That line is shifting. Beacon Biosignals, a Boston company building an AI platform for large-scale EEG and sleep analytics, announced an $86 million Series B and a major expansion of its partnership with Takeda. Together, the moves suggest that home-based brain monitoring is starting to move from the margins of CNS research toward its centre.

The new capital brings a mix of institutional investors and strategic support into Beacon’s orbit, while the Takeda extension sets out a multi-year plan to use Beacon’s at-home EEG device, sleep testing tools, and cloud analysis pipeline to support narcolepsy diagnosis and biomarker development. For Takeda, high-resolution sleep and brain recordings gathered outside the clinic offer a route to faster and less burdensome evaluation. For Beacon, it confirms that a category once dismissed as too noisy for use is beginning to embed itself in the workflows of a major pharmaceutical program.

Beacon Biosignals’ Funding Round and Takeda Deal

Last week, Beacon Biosignals announced an $86 million Series B to scale its AI-driven brain health platform and expand what it calls a precision medicine data stack for neurology and psychiatry. The round was led by Innoviva, with participation from GV, Section 32, Nexus NeuroTech Ventures, Catalio Capital Management, and Takeda as a strategic investor, bringing total funding to more than $121 million. Beacon says the capital will grow what it describes as the world’s largest neurodiagnostic dataset, extend its at-home EEG and sleep monitoring footprint, and move its AI-derived neurobiomarkers deeper into clinical development programs.

Alongside the round, Beacon and Takeda announced a multi-year expansion of their strategic collaboration, first launched in 2024, focusing on home-based EEG for sleep and rare neurological disorders. Under the new agreement, Beacon can receive up to $109 million in data license fees and development, regulatory, and commercial milestones, with potential equity participation. The work will centre on narcolepsy, using at-home EEG and sleep recordings to refine diagnostics and identify neurobiomarkers that help classify patients and track disease progression.

The collaboration relies on a specific technical stack. At its base is Waveband, Beacon’s FDA-cleared EEG headband, previously marketed as the Dreem 3S, which uses six electrodes to capture brain activity during sleep and wake. Beacon has added home sleep testing capabilities through its acquisition of CleveMed, creating a pipeline for EEG and cardiorespiratory data recorded outside the clinic. Those signals feed into cloud infrastructure and machine learning models that extract features such as sleep architecture, arousals, and other EEG signatures that can act as candidate biomarkers.

Narcolepsy is a logical first target. The disorder is characterised by heavy daytime sleepiness, broken night sleep, and in some cases, cataplexy, yet many patients wait years for a proper diagnosis. Takeda’s lead orexin-based treatment has shown strong results in trials and is moving toward regulatory review. As Takeda works to improve treatment, Beacon is being brought in to modernise how patients are identified, monitored, and understood through brain and sleep data collected at home.

From Headband to Biomarker Platform

Beacon’s hardware may sit on someone’s nightstand, but its EEG-Waveband is increasingly just the entry point to a broader product. What Beacon is really selling is a stream of labelled neurophysiology that can flow straight into clinical development: nightly EEG and sleep recordings gathered at home, linked to outcomes and diagnoses. The structure of the Takeda deal makes that clear. Milestones and licensing fees depend on how this data advances narcolepsy programs, not on how many headbands ship. In effect, Beacon is positioning itself less as a consumer EEG company and more as a biomarker partner sitting behind major CNS trials.

Beacon's EEG Waveband.

For pharma, EEG and sleep biomarkers unlock value that subjective rating scales and occasional clinic visits rarely deliver. They allow finer patient stratification by highlighting nightly patterns linked to different mechanisms or response profiles. They offer continuous, objective signals that can flag drift or futility earlier in a study. And they add exploratory measures that sit closer to physiology than questionnaires. Work with portable EEG in sleep and epilepsy has already shown that home recordings can meet a technical standard that sponsors will accept, which helps explain why Beacon’s system is entering real protocols.

In that proposition, the moat is in the dataset. Beacon aims to build the world’s largest neurodiagnostic repository and apply it across sleep, neurology, and psychiatric conditions. At scale, that means models trained on thousands of nights of EEG with clinical labels that have passed sponsor and regulator scrutiny. Consumer wearables, by contrast, sit on enormous but lightly annotated datasets collected in uncontrolled environments.

Beacon sits within a broader neurotech stack that is becoming increasingly defined. At the base is the sensing layer, from EEG headbands and sleep recorders to wearables and implants, followed by a data layer that ingests and cleans those signals. Above that sits the AI and biomarker layer, and finally the integration layer that feeds outputs into pharma workflows and regulatory filings. Beacon is one of the few EEG and sleep companies operating across all four layers, and this week’s partnership expansion is the clearest signal yet that the full stack has real value inside pharma.

[Image credit: Beacon Biosignals]