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Sens.ai is Revolutionizing Mental Wellness with AI

During VivaTech 2024 in Paris, we sat down with Paola Telfer, founder and CEO of Sens.ai. Her company is at the forefront of mental wellness technology, using innovative AI solutions to transform how we approach mental health. This interview highlights Paola’s journey, her groundbreaking product, and the future of mental wellness technology.

The Inspiration Behind Sens.ai

Paola Telfer’s journey into mental wellness technology began with a personal crisis following a motor vehicle accident. She saw gaps in the market regarding mental health solutions and decided to bridge these gaps. “I realized that there were subtle levels of mind in your subconscious that were difficult to access precisely,” she explains. This realization led to the development of Sens.ai, aiming to make these transformative tools accessible to more people.

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Innovative Neurofeedback Technology

One of the core components of Sens.ai is its neurofeedback technology. Users wear a headset and use a mobile app that transforms their biological signals, like heart rate and brain waves, into music and visuals. Paola shares, “It’s like a mirror for your mind, guiding you to deeper states of consciousness where you can rewire your stories.” This technology allows users to engage in deep mental exercises that can rewire their brains for better mental health.

Bridging Medical and Consumer Markets

While neurofeedback devices have existed in the medical space, Sens.ai aims to make this technology consumer-friendly. Paola emphasizes, “We wanted to redesign the electrodes entirely to make it super easy to use, with no paste in your hair, and seconds to get the signal going.” This user-centric approach ensures that the technology is accessible and effective for everyday use.

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The Role of AI in Mental Wellness

Sens.ai incorporates advanced AI to enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of its mental wellness technology. Paola highlights the importance of a clean data set for applying AI effectively. “We had to make sure the integrity of the data set was absolutely critical,” she notes. AI not only improves the precision of neurofeedback but also personalizes the user experience by adapting to individual needs.

Future Directions and Ethical Considerations

Looking ahead, Sens.ai aims to expand its reach and impact. The company is raising a $20 million Series A to scale its operations. Additionally, Sens.ai is exploring group coherence, where multiple users can synchronize their brainwaves and heart coherence for enhanced group dynamics. On ethics, Paola stresses the importance of transparency and simplicity in handling user data. “Your data should never harm you,” she assures, emphasizing the company’s commitment to privacy and ethical AI use.

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Fundraising 3 hours ago

London-based AI laboratory Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed on 27 April 2026. The financing is the largest seed round ever raised by a European company and one of the largest first-money-in rounds in the global history of artificial intelligence. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participating investors included Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, the British government’s recently established vehicle for backing strategic AI capacity on home soil. A bet on a different path to general intelligence Ineffable Intelligence was founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former Vice President of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind and the principal architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar. He is joined by three further DeepMind alumni: Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt and Junhyuk Oh. All four have spent the past decade at the frontier of reinforcement learning research, the discipline behind some of the most consequential demonstrations of machine learning over the past ten years. The company describes its objective as building a “superlearner” — an AI system capable of acquiring knowledge directly from its own experience rather than from human-generated text or imagery. “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement accompanying the launch. “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.” The framing is a deliberate departure from the dominant industry trajectory. Most leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind itself, have built large language models trained primarily on the corpus of the internet, then refined that training with human feedback. Ineffable’s wager is that the marginal returns on scaling text-based pretraining are diminishing and that the next leap in capability will come from agents that learn endlessly from the consequences of their own actions, in much the same way AlphaZero learnt the game of Go without studying any human matches. Why $1.1 billion at seed The size of the round is unusual even by the inflated standards of the 2026 AI capital cycle. Two factors appear to explain it. First, frontier reinforcement learning at the scale Ineffable describes is computationally extraordinarily expensive: the company will need to operate vast simulation environments and train very large models against them, an undertaking that consumes capital at a rate closer to physical R&D than to traditional software. Second, the round signals a strategic move by Europe’s investor and policy ecosystems to retain the most ambitious AI researchers on the continent. The presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed and Nvidia is the clearest expression of that intent. The British government has publicly framed the investment as a bet on breakthrough AI that “can discover new knowledge”, positioning the country as a willing co-investor in domestic frontier laboratories. For Ineffable, the implication is access not only to capital but to compute, regulatory engagement and the still-resilient academic talent base around UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Founder pledge of historic scale Alongside the funding announcement, Silver disclosed that he is committing 100 per cent of any personal proceeds from his Ineffable equity to charity via the Founders Pledge network — described by the organisation as the largest pledge in its history. At the round’s $5.1 billion valuation, that commitment could ultimately exceed several billion dollars if the company succeeds. It is a meaningful gesture in a sector where the reputational stakes around concentrated AI wealth are escalating, and one likely to be referenced in subsequent founder-led commitments. Implications for the European AI landscape Ineffable’s emergence reshapes the European AI map in three concrete ways. It establishes London as the home of the continent’s largest-ever seed-stage company, complicating Paris’s recent narrative of frontier-AI primacy after Mistral’s earlier rounds. It validates a thesis — that reinforcement learning, not transformer scaling, is the next frontier — that has lately been losing capital share to language-model incumbents. And it confirms that the UK government is now willing to act as a balance-sheet co-investor in domestic AI laboratories, a posture much closer to the French model than to the predominantly grant-based regimes elsewhere in Europe. The execution risk is non-trivial. Reinforcement learning at frontier scale has historically required years of careful environment design before producing competitive systems, and Ineffable’s “first contact” framing sets a high bar against which it will be judged. But for now, with a billion dollars on the balance sheet, four of the discipline’s most accomplished researchers in the founding team and a sovereign co-investor at its back, Ineffable Intelligence is the most heavily resourced new entrant in the European AI cycle. Sesamers covers European fundraising rounds across deeptech, fintech and AI. Source: tech.eu.

Fundraising 5 days ago

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