How Neurostellar Is Making Mental Fitness Measurable

In a world where marginal gains decide winners, a Chennai-based neurotech startup is quietly building tools to measure — and improve — mental performance. Neurostellar’s flagship product, Orbit, is a smart headband that pairs EEG (brain) and PPG (cardio-respiratory) signals with machine learning to give real-time insights into focus, stress, and cognitive fatigue. Initially targeting elite athletes, high-pressure professionals, and defense pilots, the company is positioning mental fitness as the next mainstream wellness category. 

Founding story — from lab corridors to performance arenas

Neurostellar was co-founded by Karthik Raghavendran and Dhanushya Sree Ramesh in 2021 as an IIT-M (IIT Madras) incubated startup. Raghavendran serves as the CEO and is a passionate neurotech entrepreneur, also founding the NeurotechX – India Chapter itself. Ramesh is the co-founder and visionary, focusing on business strategies to help grow the company. 

Neurostellar build a product that turns lab-quality brain metrics into practical tools for better performance. Born inside the IIT Madras incubation ecosystem, the team leveraged academic rigor, access to research labs, and early mentorship to move faster from prototype to pilots. Early traction came from focused pilots with chess grandmasters, corporate executives, and even the Indian Air Force — proof that the device’s insights translate across different high-pressure situations only. 

Also Read: BreathingRoom: A New Era for Workplace Wellness & Mental Health

What Orbit does — tech that meets real need

Orbit creates technology that addresses actual problems people face. The platform itself focuses on developing solutions that further meet genuine user requirements.

Further, Orbit does not track your daily steps like regular fitness devices. It focuses on different health measurements instead of counting how much you walk. It uses multimodal sensor approach. This approach combines different sensing methods. 

EEG (Electroencephalography): Two active channels (AF7 & AF8) capture brainwave patterns associated with focus, distraction, and cognitive load. This method further helps in understanding the brain activity itself during different mental states.

PPG (Photoplethysmography): Multi-wavelength optical sensors measure heart rate dynamics and breathing patterns to estimate stress and recovery estimation. 

Inertial sensors & signal processing: Motion sensors and advanced filters remove noise from real-world movements, improving data quality outside lab settings. And, these motion sensors use advanced filters to improve data quality outside controlled laboratory settings.

Edge + Cloud ML: On-device preprocessing preserves privacy while cloud models deliver personalized baselines, adaptive scoring, and session analytics. 

Analytics dashboard & coaching: Users receive session summaries, pattern detection (best time-of-day for deep work).  The system provides actionable interventions for recovery and focused work. 

Basically, Orbit combines brain signals, body data, and context information to get the same cognitive state readings more accurately than single-signal devices.

Business model & go-to-market — pilots, partnerships, and monetization

Rather than racing to mass retail from day one, Neurostellar opted for pilot-driven GTM. This strategy allowed them to validate their product before broader expansion. Basically, the startup tested their product with top performers like chess players and business leaders to validate the same use cases and improve algorithms based on real human behaviour. Such pilots demonstrate both efficacy and willingness to pay, making the leap to B2B and premium direct-to-consumer offerings feasible.  

Revenue channels further include the following options. The business model itself generates income through these various streams:

Enterprise & team subscriptions serve sports academies and corporate programs. Team packages support defense training and organizational resilience programs.

Premium consumer memberships for executives and high-performance practitioners. These plans offer advanced features for business leaders. 

Hardware + SaaS model with device sales or leasing plus recurring analytics fees. This approach creates both immediate revenue from equipment and continuous income from software services.

Early investor, most notably angel backing from founders of Ather Energy—add credibility and runway for product development and market expansion.  

“Neurostellar isn’t just building a wearable — it’s building a new language for mental performance, where focus, stress, and recovery are no longer invisible.”

Why this matters — impact potential across sectors

Neurostellar’s proposition intersects with several powerful macro trends: 

Performance optimization: In elite sports and competitive professions, even small improvements in attention and recovery produce outsized results. Real-time neurofeedback can shorten the path from training to performance. 

Mental health & resilience: By quantifying stress and cognitive fatigue, Orbit headband can support early intervention and evidence-based coaching—useful for corporate wellbeing programs and clinical research partnerships.

Defense & safety-critical domains: Pilots, surgeons, and first responders operate under acute cognitive load; objective metrics enable training, scheduling, and fatigue risk management. Early pilots with defense organizations hint at these possibilities. 

New consumer category: Mental fitness—distinct from mental health—positions users to treat cognition as a trainable, measurable physical fitness metric, opening subscription and ecosystem opportunities. 

The cumulative effect: better productivity, safer operations, and a measurable path to resilience.

Competitive landscape and differentiation

The wearable market now includes major wellness brands and specialist neurotech players. Neurostellar’s competitive advantages include:

• Multimodal sensing (EEG + PPG) for richer, cross-validated signals. 
• IIT Madras roots and lab credibility, which help validate claims and attract research collaborations with other institutions. 
• Targeted pilot use cases (elite sports, defense) that establish credibility before consumer scale. 

However, large wearables brands and specialized neurotech firms are also moving fast. Neurostellar’s path is to keep refining accuracy, demonstrate meaningful outcomes, and build trusted partnerships that are hard for generalist players to replicate.

Challenges ahead — adoption, regulation, and trust

As per current trends, the wearable market now has big wellness brands and special neurotech companies. Regarding market growth, both types of players are competing in this space. As per market analysis, Neurostellar has key competitive advantages regarding its position in the industry. These benefits include strong technical capabilities and market expertise: 

User trust & data privacy: Brain data is sensitive. Clear privacy policies, on-device preprocessing, and transparent data governance will be essential to adoption. 

Clinical vs. consumer claims: Positioning Orbit headband as a performance and wellbeing tool rather than a medical device helps market entry, but scaling into health applications will require validation studies and regulatory approval paths. 

Cost & accessibility: High-quality sensors and signal processing increase the overall system cost. This makes the technology less accessible for widespread implementation. Neurostellar will succeed when they make their pricing and models work for regular pilots, not just elite ones. They need leasing options and enterprise bundles to make this technology accessible to more people. 

Scientific validation at scale: Scientific validation surely requires testing beyond laboratory settings, as lab-level correlation differs from real-world ecological validity. Moreover, findings must be verified across different populations and contexts to establish true scientific credibility. Partnerships with research institutions can further accelerate trust-building. This collaboration itself helps establish credibility faster.

Also Read: The Corporate Wellness: 7 Startups Making Remote Work Healthier

Roadmap and vision — where Neurostellar could go next

If early signals hold, the company could expand along multiple axes:

Product suite: From the current headband to form-factor variants (earbuds, workplace sensors) and richer coaching modules 

Market expansion: The company expanded its market operations from India to the UAE and the US markets. This expansion further strengthened the business itself across international regions. Basically, these are markets with consumers who can pay and have the same established sports and defense programs.

Research & clinical partnerships: Collaborations with neuroscience labs to publish outcomes and validate the device for broader therapeutic applications or clinical use.  

Ecosystem plays: Integrations with corporate wellbeing platforms, sports performance suites, and sleep/fitness ecosystems to broaden stickiness and lifetime value. 

Initial focus: 

The company’s earliest work addressed the high rate of misdiagnosis in epilepsy patients by developing a wearable electroencephalography (EEG) system for seizure detection and classification.

Incubation and funding: 

The startup received a grant from the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) and has been incubated at the IIT-Madras Incubation Cell. In May 2025, Neurostellar secured over $150,000 in angel funding from investors, including Ather Energy co-founders Swapnil Jain and Tarun Mehta.

Conclusion — mental fitness as the next big frontier

Neurostellar is emblematic of a generation of startups that translate deep science into tangible, everyday value. By turning noisy brain and body signals into actionable insights, the company is not only building hardware—it is laying the groundwork for a new category: measurable mental fitness. Neurostellar has strong academic connections and angel funding that provide credibility and further runway for growth. The company itself is moving from small pilot projects to mainstream adoption, making it worth monitoring. 

The company offers a fresh, under-reported narrative that blends tech, sport, defense, and human performance—ideal for readers hungry for the next wave of meaningful innovation.