Who we work with
Companies in neurotechnology, diagnostics, digital care and prevention, when growth, adoption, reimbursement or the investment case depends on how the evidence is understood by the clinicians, payers and investors they have to win.
Employers and the providers that serve them, where the attention, cognition and mental health of a workforce have become a cost the board can see and a question of strategy.
Research institutions, foundations, initiatives and policy bodies that have to take ideas and evidence from the clinic, the laboratory and everyday life to boards, capital and the public, and the leaders and investors behind all three.
Relevant experience
Our work in brain health runs from an international mental health initiative that brought researchers, practitioners and institutions together behind a platform for what works, to the evidence, partnership and public-engagement questions that institutions, foundations and companies bring us. It had to be made credible to the institutions that joined it, the funders it needed and the public it was built for, the sequence most of this sector shares.
We have also worked closely with how a brain condition is evidenced: where longitudinal specialist data, clinical consensus and the tests institutions apply diverge, and what each decider needs to see. Few conditions test an institution’s evidence as hard as those the scan does not show.
When clients call us
When the evidence is in and the market has not followed. A trial has read out or a clearance has arrived, and adoption, reimbursement and repeatable demand have not followed. We establish what clinicians, payers and employers each need to see, which first buyer and which evidence convert, and which reference clinics and payer pilots would make demand repeatable.
When the organisation has outgrown its category. A diagnostics business adding a treatment pathway, a workplace platform adding clinical care, a mental health provider becoming a brain health one, an institute moving from research to action. We test what the organisation can claim, define the category it wants to be found in and make it legible to customers, funders and the press.
When the case has to be made to capital or a board. A financing, a listing, a partnership, a foundation’s decision to invest, a group’s decision to stay in neuroscience. The economics of the brain are indirect and long-dated, and the people pricing them discount what they cannot check. We relate the diagnosis funnel, the reimbursement path, the sequence of readouts and the capital need to a case investors and boards can test.
When ideas and evidence have to move institutions and the public. A research agenda, a prevention case, a national plan, an initiative that needs researchers, clinicians, employers, policymakers and cultural voices to act together. We design the partnership structure, map the constituencies by influence rather than proximity and build the public case, with counsel. We are not lobbyists.
When scrutiny tests the claim. A null trial, an adverse readout, an evidence critique, a reimbursement refusal. We establish the facts, agree what may be said before it is in a filing, test how each stakeholder will read them and prepare the position with leadership, clinical and legal. Communication will not change a result. It can make sure a result is read as a finding and not as a verdict.
Our perspective
The conditions of the brain carry a larger share of the world’s ill health than of its attention or its health budgets. Nervous-system conditions are the leading cause of disability worldwide, and governments give mental health about two per cent of what they spend on health, a share unchanged in a decade. We think of this as the visibility discount: the share of a condition’s cost that the systems paying for it cannot see and therefore do not price. Closing it is work for boards, capital and the public as much as for clinics.
The brain is underpriced because its costs are hard to see
A broken leg is visible on an image, a sick day and a bill. Most of the brain’s burden is not: a worker present and impaired, a carer out of the labour market, a diagnosis made years late. In Europe the costs outside the health system are at least as large as those inside it, and the case for acting is now made, by the World Economic Forum and the institutes around it, in trillions of dollars of output over the coming decades. We read that case as instrumental, not foundational: an argument for brain health that rests on productivity alone loses the people it should serve and the sceptics it needs to persuade.
Evidence travels badly from the clinic to the decision
An institution built for structural proof can read a normal image as the absence of a condition, a reported symptom as the absence of evidence. In Europe today payers assess a blood test and a new medicine on different timelines, so diagnosis runs ahead of treatment. Each decider applies its own visibility discount, and the organisation that knows which evidence converts for which of them, and claims no more than that evidence supports, is the one whose position survives.
Technology raises the stakes in both directions
AI pushes the brain two ways at once: it adds uncertainty, pace and overload, and it widens what people can learn, make and solve. The evidence so far points to how the technology is used, not whether, as the decisive variable, which makes design and norms of use the question for employers and the cost of care the question for providers. Neurotechnology is moving from case series to regulated products, and neural data is being written into law as sensitive. On screens and the young, the decline in adolescent mental health across rich countries is established, the screen’s causal share is small and contested and the early evidence on bans is modest. A careful institution says exactly that.
Credibility in this sector is earned by what is not claimed
Brain health has real breakthroughs and a long record of oversold ones, and its audiences test the claim before the company. Sometimes the stronger position is a narrower claim, a different first buyer, a partner the clinic already trusts or an admission the evidence requires, and we say so before the argument is written. We do not assess the science. Qualified clinicians and scientists do. We establish whether a payer, a regulator or an investor can check what the organisation says. We check for conflicts before accepting a brief. Our founder leads the work, inside the organisation’s logic and outside its bubble, alongside the client’s clinical, scientific, financial and legal advisers, never instead of them, and will take one part of a broader assignment where that is what is needed.
How we help
- Market intelligence and growth opportunities
- Triangulating clinician, payer and investor evidence to establish where a brain health organisation can win, by indication, buyer and geography.
- Category and corporate positioning
- Defining what a company, an institute or an initiative may claim, from mental health to brain health and from product to category, and making the position legible to customers, funders and the press.
- Evidence-to-adoption strategy
- Establishing which evidence converts for clinicians, payers, employers and regulators, closing the visibility discount buyer by buyer, and building the reference clinics, payer pilots and proof points that make demand repeatable.
- Investor relations and capital narratives
- Relating evidence, reimbursement, readouts and capital needs to a consistent case for a financing, a listing or a board decision, alongside the organisation’s financial advisers.
- Partnerships, institutions and public engagement
- Designing the partnership structure, constituencies and public case an initiative, a research agenda or a prevention programme needs.
- Policy, plans and market access
- Mapping the institutions, national plans, reimbursement rules and data-protection regimes that set the market, and preparing the public case with counsel.
- Leadership, reputation and defining moments
- Profiling founders, clinicians and institute leaders as credible voices; handling announcements and transactions; and crisis management for an adverse readout, an evidence critique or a reimbursement refusal, with media relations in German, French, Swedish and English markets.