How Subsense Is Reimagining BCIs With a Nasal Spray Instead of Brain Surgery

The idea of reading brain signals daily has become a fairly straightforward reality. With the rise of BCIs, stimulating the brain based on those readings is becoming a closer reality as well. To do that effectively, though, you need an advanced electrode placed precisely in the brain. That may be viable for quadriplegics, but the average person is not lining up for brain surgery. Tetiana Aleksandrova launched Subsense to reach the same outcomes as invasive BCIs, replacing surgery with a nasal spray.

Subsense was founded around the concept of nanoparticle BCIs: tiny particles that can enter the brain through the nose while retaining the ability to monitor and modulate brain activity. That could prove incredibly valuable in treating neurological diseases. But Tetiana’s ambitions extend far beyond clinical uses. She envisions a future where even healthy individuals sniff these particles to boost their brains, enhancing abilities from vision to memory.

From Moscow to Silicon Valley

Ukrainian entrepreneur Tetiana moved across the border to Russia in her early twenties. Brimming with ambition, she completed an MBA in Moscow before launching several companies. The most successful was Neiry, a non-invasive wearable company that could be described as the first commercially viable BCI in Eastern Europe.

In 2022, when Russia invaded Tetiana’s native Ukraine, she had to leave the country where she had spent a decade working at the frontier of business and brain science. Crossing the Atlantic, she settled in Palo Alto on the US West Coast. It was a major leap: from pushing boundaries in familiar Moscow to landing in what many consider the world’s most innovation-dense region, Silicon Valley.

Tetiana quickly realized she hadn’t just changed continents; she had entered an entirely new arena of innovation. Here, entrepreneurs are better educated, investors carry deeper pockets, technology is several years ahead, and competition is unforgiving. So when she decided to start a new BCI company, she knew it couldn’t be a “simple” EEG wearable. To survive in Silicon Valley, she had to build something most people thought was impossible.

Here, you need to fight because the bar is really exceptional, extraordinary. In your results, in your vision, in your team. You need to be the best, just to enter the arena.

In Russia, Tetiana had designed wearables for healthy individuals. In the US, she witnessed firsthand the potential of inserting invasive chips, such as those produced by Neuralink. But it was clear to her that no healthy individual would voluntarily undergo brain surgery. Tetiana started Subsense, with cofounder Artem Sokolov, lead investor from Golden Falcon Capital, to develop a BCI with the bandwidth and accuracy of invasive devices, without cutting a millimeter into the brain.

Tetiana Aleksandrova with her co-founder Artem Sokolov.

After about a year of ideation and experimentation across various modalities, Tetiana and her team developed their proprietary solution: nanoparticles. These tiny particles, inserted through the nose, travel across the brain to targeted regions, where they act as miniature antennas. They receive signals from a wearable headset and directly stimulate surrounding brain areas.

Inside Subsense’s Nanoparticles

Subsense’s head of R&D, Scott Meek, brings a long track record of working with small molecules and materials. At MIT, he developed dyes that function as contrast agents for β-amyloid plaques, the key marker of Alzheimer’s disease. He later moved into industry, applying his expertise to commercial biosensors. Subsense may be his most ambitious project yet.

A visualisation of a nanoparticle.

Scott explains, “Nanoparticles are small enough to interact with almost every chemical and biological process, yet they still retain the properties of bulk material, which makes them like tiny machines.” Those properties allow Scott and the team to engineer particles that act as miniature antennas, small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier.

“They can be introduced through the nasal cavity and reach the brain via the optic nerve.” Because of their size, the particles can also be guided through the brain using a magnetic field. “This gives us a very low barrier to entry compared to a surgical BCI,” Scott notes. 

In Parkinson’s disease, nanoparticles could serve as an alternative to deep-brain stimulation. Instead of surgically implanting electrodes, the particles would be delivered nasally, positioned in the right brain region, and magnetically stimulated to alleviate symptoms. If they match the efficacy of DBS, the technique would offer a cheaper, less invasive option for the growing population affected by Parkinson’s.

Scott Meek (Head of R&D) and Tetiana Aleksandrova (CEO).

How Subsense Will Enhance Human Cognition

At Subsense, the mission extends well beyond clinical applications. “We are creating a platform that will help other developers build applications on top of our technology,” Tetiana explains. Using their Parkinson’s program as an example, she continues: “The first application we’re creating is more like a showcase: ‘Hey, look, you can build this, and many other applications, with this technology.’”

The long-term vision of enhancing the cognitive abilities of healthy individuals is bold, but the approach is methodical. “The further it goes, the more uncertain it becomes. Before we get to humans and singularity, we need to succeed with many simpler applications,” Tetiana says.

She points to vision as one pathway. “For healthy individuals, it might mean super-vision, being able to see in the dark. But before that, we’ll start by restoring vision for people who lost it, and through that process, we’ll learn how brain patterns work. Then we can help healthy individuals.”

By the end of 2026, Subsense aims to demonstrate the potential of its platform in mice. The team is preparing experiments to read brain signals and then stimulate neurons, targeting symptoms linked to Parkinson’s and epilepsy. From there, the path to human trials and regulatory approval begins. If nanoparticles can withstand that journey, Tetiana intends to move full speed toward the “superhuman” applications that motivated her to launch her second BCI venture.

In general, we're planning to work with different parts of the brain that are responsible for different applications. In the very end, it all comes together, and basically, you are becoming the super version of yourself.

Why Non-Invasive BCIs Are the Future

Bringing nanoparticle BCIs to everyday consumers may still be more than a decade away, but Tetiana is convinced that non-invasive approaches are the only path to mass adoption. “When we go to neuroscience conferences, we ask people in the BCI field: ‘What would it take for you personally to have a BCI installed?’ And almost everyone answers the same: ‘It has to be much less invasive.’”

Still, nanoparticles are not a silver bullet for bridging the brain and computer. “Our technology has limitations compared to classic invasive brain-computer interfaces. For example, we can reach about two to three centimeters into the brain at most. For certain medical applications, you need to go deeper, and classic invasive BCIs can do that.”

For healthy individuals, however, Tetiana is confident that non-invasive BCIs will eventually become part of daily life. “I don’t believe it will happen all at once. I think it will start in eight to ten years, with more and more applications introduced by different companies. At some point, it may feel like we’re no longer entirely human.”

For now, Subsense is focused on gathering the first in vivo data for its technology. The company has just opened a new lab in Palo Alto and is positioning itself as an attractive bet for both investors and the scientific community. “There will be a growing body of our own in vivo data over the next 18 months, and we’ll share what we can,” Tetiana says. “That’s what I’m most excited about. We’ve spent a long time on materials development, and now we finally get to start applying what we’ve built.”

About the Founder

Tetiana Aleksandrova is the Co-Founder and CEO of Subsense. Originally from Ukraine, she earned her MBA in Moscow before founding Neiry, a non-invasive BCI company. After relocating to the U.S. in 2022, she launched Subsense in Palo Alto to create non-surgical nanoparticle BCIs that could rival invasive devices in accuracy and bandwidth. Her journey reflects a commitment to pushing neurotechnology from clinical frontiers into everyday applications.

About the Firm

Founded in 2022 in Palo Alto by Tetiana Aleksandrova, Subsense is a neurotechnology startup pioneering the use of nanoparticles for brain-computer interfaces. Its approach delivers tiny particles through the nasal cavity, where they travel to targeted brain regions and act as miniature antennas, enabling both monitoring and modulation of neural activity. By offering a minimally invasive alternative to brain surgery, Subsense is first pursuing treatments for neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and epilepsy, while laying the groundwork for future cognitive enhancement in healthy individuals.

Visit: www.subsense-bci.com