Daybreak - Welcome to the 'brain gym': DIY neurotech is now in India, no prescription required

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

For decades, sending an electric current into the brain meant a hospital, a doctor, and a diagnosis. A Bengaluru startup called Mave Health wants to move it into your daily routine. Its Rs 30,000 headset uses tDCS, a low current to the prefrontal cortex, to ease stress before it builds. The technology is decades old and well-evidenced. What's new is who controls it. Mave sells directly to consumers, no prescription and no regulator sign-off, on the argument that it's simply a consumer electronic. The Ken reporter Sudeshna Ray wore one herself to find out how that feels. Can medicine's oldest question, who gets to treat your brain, survive being sold like earphones?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

When was the last time that you thought about your brain? I'm not talking about heart, your weight, your actual brain. If you asked me, I would say, honestly, I don't remember. And to think that this thing is actually running the whole show for us and is also usually the first thing to suffer when things get too stressful? Today, I'm going to read you a report by my colleague Soudesha Rui about a startup that thinks it can fix that, with a headset that pipes a tiny electrical current into your skull to dial down stress.

There's no prescription or doctor. It is sold like a pair of earphones. Soudesha even strapped one on herself at a cafe while sipping coffee. What happened next is worth hearing about. Last week, I sat in a cafe wearing a black goggle-like headset pushed on my forehead that could have come straight out of the Jetsons. Except Mave, as the headset is called, was sending a little. 2 millie-amperors, MA, of electrical signals to the front of my brain, and was intended to

reduce stress. The technology we are building is about dialing into cognitive states, said Dawal Jen, co-founder and CEO of Mave Health. He sat across the table from me and had earlier pulled out a boomerang-shaped case from his backpack. Inside it was the headset which came with two trapsoid saline-soaked sponges, electrodes, to send low-intensity currents into the brain. Mave uses transcranial direct current stimulation, or TDCS, the same technology that has been used to treat stroke, migraine and psychiatric disorders for decades. It is designed to work over time with repeated sessions slowly nudging the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for focus, emotion management and rationalization to better regulation.

All this was now sitting on my head and I was starting to feel a little bit of the brain. light tingling sensation. Still, it was nothing like what I had expected a medical device to look or feel like. Nor was it anything like meditating in silence to reduce stress. I was sipping coffee and talking about the device while using it. As Jane would later tell me, that was the entire point. Maeve Health, the NeuroTech company that makes the headset, is based out of Bangalore and San Francisco and was founded in 2023. It has, until now, raised $2.85 million dollars from from investors like Bloom Ventures, all in Capital and Stanford Angels. Their flagship device has been available in the Indian and U.S. market since January and costs

almost $30,000.000. The company initially beta tested the device with more than 500 Indian users all reached through word of mouth. Since the official launch in January 26, Jane claimed it has sold several hundred devices in India. Mave's headset also sits below the regulatory threat. requiring clinical trials or a doctor's prescription. The Central Drug Standard Control Organization or CDSCO, India's medical device regulator, does not have to sign off on it.

It is a consumer electronic product, Jen said. When I first put it on, I was prepared to feel nothing. Most first-time users notice very little. But surprisingly, I was starting to notice quite a lot. I was a bit more intentional about every observation, oscillating between hyper-focus and being phased out. And I couldn't help wondering what just happened to my brain. How do people feel after a few weeks of using something like this?

And who is monitoring their long-term brain health? Above all, though, something about a device that sends electrical currents into the brain being sold in the same category as earphones didn't sit right with me. Earlier this year, I wrote about preventive health in India and I have been thinking a lot about my own health status course since then. How is my heart doing? Could I get cancer? How do you get something early?

My brain was not on that list. The brain is the most neglected organ in a screening, said a preventive health specialist of a top hospital in India. Its treatment is reactive, meaning people only bother coming in when something serious happens. Mental health suffers from the same problem. And unlike many other conditions, there are no surgical fixes for it.

It is a mismatch between the human brain and modern life, according to Jen. Current lifestyles have sprung beyond what the evolved brain can handle, said the preventive health specialist. So it is always overwhelmed and unable to process daily inputs. Mental health is ignored, she added, or band-aided with antidepressants. India, where nearly one in 20 adults lives with depression, writes over 30 million antidepressants, prescriptions in a year for mental health. Most of these are hush-hush and taken only when the conditions get severe. While depression has been rising for decades, the way we deal with it largely hasn't.

In the brain, it is the prefrontal cortex that bears much of this burden, and it is exactly where Mave's headset works. The global neurostimulation tech market is worth well over $5 billion, dollars according to reports. In India, it is valued at a few hundred million with segments such as spinal cord and deep brain stimulators leading. So far, it has been a market that has catered to treating serious injuries. And Mave's headset is a preventive care device that sits somewhere between improving mental health and biohacking. The US is our primary market, said Jen. 80% of their business comes from there. But we also want to focus on India because that is where the mission started. While its upfront price tag might seem steep, it costs roughly as much as other forms of mental health treatment in India. Therapy is just as expensive, said a friend when I mentioned this device.

In Bangalore or Mumbai, a one-hour therapy session costs anywhere between $1,000 to $3,000. Going weekly for three months lands you with a similar bill as buying a mave. But this device is not meant to replace therapy. Jen, who started the company after losing a close friend to sue, side drew a parallel between the hardware and software of the brain. Therapy works on the software, thought patterns, beliefs and behaviors that are built over time. Neurostimulation, which Mave provides, works on the hardware, the biological aspect to bring regulation back.

When the hardware is underfunctioning, the brain triggers fear or anxiety more easily, making progress with therapy alone difficult, Jen said. TDCS modulates neurons, strengthening the physical. foundation that allows psychological work to stick. If a gear shift is broken, refueling won't push the car. That is the basic idea. The TDCS technology itself isn't new to India. I have been prescribing this device routinely for a decade, said Ashi Sharma, a neurologist

at Ames-Belaspur. He calls it the poor man's TMS. Transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS is used to treat medical-resistant neurological conditions such as major depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD. The TMS machines cost anywhere between 50 lakh to 2 crore rupees and are administered only in clinical settings. TDCS devices from Indian companies like Medi Systems, on the other hand, costs around $10,000 to $20,000 and are even covered under select insurance schemes

and Ayushman Bharat, the government's insurance plan for economically constrained families. Though the tech across existing TDCS devices and Mave is the same, the delivery methods of the former aren't as appetizing. Even though patients take it home, there are two wires that need to be connected to a physical amp, said Charma of the Medi Systems TDCS machine. For decades, clinical framing has defined how TDCS is used as a treatment for stroke rehabilitation and psychiatric conditions administered by doctors after a problem. emerges. Maeve wants to flip that model. For starters, it isn't selling to doctors and it wants to become more preventive than for after something happens. Electrical neuromodulation is not new to India either. Take Nereviou, a device by pharmaceutical major Dr. Reddy's prescribed for chronic migraines that I wrote about last year. Strapes onto the forearm, connects to an app and sends electrical

signals to the brain to reduce pain. It's a clinical device approved by the American Food and Drug Administration and is used under the supervision of a neurologist. It uses remote electrical neuromodulation or REN providing high-frequency alternating electrical pulses of up to 40 millie-amphers to the peripheral nerves of the upper arm. But it only enters the picture after a migraine diagnosis. Maeve, however, wants to come in before anything happens, to maintain brain health with, its 2 millie-ampure current. The difference in intensity of the electrical signal is why Mave faces fewer regulatory checks. In this range, the technology is absolutely reliable.

There are decades of evidence behind this, said Ashu Bhasin, a Ph.E. Neurology and a research consultant at Ames, New Delhi, who has studied the impact of TDCS for the last seven years. As for the side effects, some groginess and mild skin irritation at the electrode site are the extent of it, she added. Floo Neuroscience, a Swedish Neurotech company, was the first to get the FDA stamp of approval for a home-use non-invasive brain stimulation device to treat depression in 2025. Flo's TDCS device is currently marketed via hospitals and is in use in the UK and is prescription only in the US. Mave is pretty much entering the same market but available directly to consumers. But home use efficacy lacks clinical evidence and it may be a bit too early to

bypass professional oversight entirely, she said. You cannot treat these like massagers. They are still currents that are being sent to the brain. You need a precise mapping of electrode placement on the skull to target specific brain regions accurately, said Bersin. Her studies are based on devices that require the anode cathode and amp setup, like the MediSystems, devices that Sharma uses. That is the exact variability that we are taking away, said Mave's gen. Most ADCS devices on the market are also not built for Indian skulls. For instance, Maeve uses a trapezoidal electrode sponge that works better for all foreheads as opposed to flowed circular sponges. In India, Maeve envisions its device to be like a gym for the brink.

stripped of clinical jargon and easy to use. But tracking its effectiveness is not as easy as putting it on. Most changes in mental state are reported by the user with a few credible means to clinically verify them. Self-reporting or patient-reported experience measures is a global standard method for mental health checks, said Bhassin. Only over long-term usage of something can brain scans indicate a change. It is the same play as the CGM,

or continuous glucose monitoring, Jane said. The idea is similar to Ultra-Humans M1, which sinks to Abbott's Diabetes Patch and can manage diabetes as well as track overall metabolic health. The technology does not change, he added. The form factor evolves to improve adoption and endurance while unlocking more use cases for millions of people. India has spent decades treating brain stimulation as a clinical intervention. Mave is betting that it can become a consumer habit.

The challenge was first to prove that the electrical currents can alter brain states. That part is settled. It is now about proving that consumers can be trusted with technology that medicine has historically kept behind hospital walls. And Mave is hoping that the bridge is smaller than it looks. After my session was done, Jen himself popped on the headset, casually, like he's just putting on a pair of headphones. And I walked out feeling somewhere between sleepy and dazed.

Part of me was happy noticing everything with a heightened sense of awareness for the story. But later, as I sat staring at the blank page, another part of me prayed that my usually anxious, jittery brain would come back so I could actually get on with writing the draft. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories,

newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleagues Niktha Sharma and edited by Rajiv Sien.