Mave Health aims to improve attention and mood with its brain-stimulating headphone

Over the past few years, there has been a steady stream of startups trying to treat issues like depression, menstrual pain, PMS, anxiety, and insomnia with wearable devices that apply electrical, magnetic, or ultrasound signals to stimulate the brain.

San Francisco-based Mave Health is the latest in this fleet, and claims its $495 neuromodulation headset can improve attention and mood, regulate stress, and even measure mental health. The startup is positioning the wearable as a non-medical device, so it will not need clearance from agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be sold in the US.

Dhawal Jain, who started the company in 2023 with his college mates Jay Sharma (CMO) and Aman Kumar (CTO), said he realized the need for such a device after his flatmate’s fiancée committed suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

“In India, suicide is a crime, which meant the police were involved, and we had to talk to her psychiatrist. The answers we got from them made us wonder if any of it made sense. We started reaching out to other psychologists and were getting the same answers,” Jain said.

The founders felt that there was no concrete way to measure progress in mental health. “For example, if you ask a psychologist how to tell if a person is making progress, his or her response is pretty standard, which is that it’s not about progress. It’s about process. […] But for someone with depression who spends a lot of time in treatment, progress is important. So how do you know if they’re making progress? Even these basic questions have not been answered.”

In an attempt to solve this problem, the team began to learn more about neuroscience by talking to experts, and soon after they realized that although progress on neuromodulation was being made in laboratories, consumers were not benefiting from it.

The company then worked with medical device and mental health experts to conduct trials of the technology. But she eventually took a different route and positioned her headphones as a lifestyle device. This approach will allow Mave to reach a wider audience, Jain said.

Device and technology

The Mave Health device uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive technology to deliver low-intensity currents to the brain to activate neurons. This technique is sometimes used in psychology, and is said to be safe. Side effects are mild and temporary, such as itching or discomfort.

The headset delivers a low current of 1-2mA for brain stimulation. The startup says customers can use the device, which weighs about 100 grams, at any time, and recommends daily 20-minute sessions for the first few weeks of use.

The startup also offers an app that can measure long-term trends in mood, focus, and stress levels. It can also integrate with other health data and track measures such as heart rate variability (HRV). Users start with a self-reported baseline assessment when starting out, and complete follow-up assessments every two to four weeks, which helps Mave understand whether the device is helping the user long-term, Jain said.

The company has not conducted any clinical trials or published any studies yet. However, Jain says it has worked with more than 500 users in a private beta in 2024 and 2025, with eight out of ten users reporting a 60% increase in productivity. The startup noted that 75% of private beta users also reported a reduction in stress from their baseline within two months of use.

Mave Health said it has conducted four observational studies across 200 participants that are undergoing academic review with the aim of publishing them this year.

Dr Himanshu Nirvan, a Delhi-based psychiatrist who worked with Mave Health as a consultant, said tDCS-based devices are a proven way to address mental health-related issues. However, he noted that he did not look at technology from a lifestyle perspective.

The company says it ran a program in India with Dr. Nirvan to test the device and technology.

“We selected a lot of patients, and it was basically a good program in my opinion. Things like this are not generally readily available even in mental health management,” Dr. Nirvan said. “I felt like for a lot of people, tDCS is actually a pretty good method, considering that it’s a very portable device. You can basically charge it at home, or take it anywhere you want, even while you’re traveling.”

Elkin Charvet, a clinical neuropsychologist and professor of neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told TechCrunch via email that although tDCS is considered a safe and effective neuromodulation approach, the devices need to be well-designed to properly align the electrodes, and users need regular, consistent sessions.

“One challenge is that consumers may use the device without clinical testing or clear guidance about whether it is appropriate for their symptoms. Another challenge is that it may be difficult for users to determine whether the device is actually helping if results are not measured in a structured way,” she said.

Charvet added that the use of tDCS for widespread lifestyle improvement in healthy individuals has not been widely studied. “To date, most of the strongest research has focused on clinical populations or structured cognitive training paradigms,” she said. “We do not yet have clear guidelines or strong evidence to support the use of tDCS to improve performance in healthy individuals. A lifestyle use case may still emerge, but that will depend on clearly defining target outcomes and showing that the effects are measurable and replicable.”

The device is currently available for pre-order, and the company aims to ship the first batch to customers in the US and India in April 2026.

The company recently raised $2.1 million in a seed funding round led by Blume Ventures, with participation from individual investors including Tesla Autopilot AI leader Dhaval Shroff. The startup has raised just under $3 million in funding to date.