India's Non-Invasive Answer to Elon Musk's Neuralink | Siddharth Panwar @ NeuroDx
Founder Thesis · 2026-05-29 · 1h 1m
Episode notes
Most Indian AI startups are racing to build chatbots for Indic languages. Dr. Siddharth Panwar took a different bet, building India's first non-invasive brain-computer interface on 60,000 hours of EEG data that hospitals were about to throw away. Trained at Stanford as an electrical engineer and forged at IIT Delhi as a brain scientist, Dr. Siddharth Panwar spent ten years sitting outside neurologists' rooms collecting EEG data that nobody else wanted. That patience became NeuroDx.ai, the deeptech startup behind MANAS-1, India's first 400-million-parameter brain foundation model trained on 60,000 hours of EEG signals from over 25,000 patients. In conversation with host Akshay Datt, Siddharth explains why the West gave up on EEG too soon, why a non-invasive brain-computer interface can capture 80 percent of Neuralink's value at a fraction of the cost, and why Indian VCs still struggle to underwrite frontier scientific risk in AI neurodiagnostics. Selected as one of twelve IndiaAI Mission sovereign AI champions, NeuroDx is the only physiological foundation model in the cohort, arriving exactly as Indian deeptech enters its sovereign AI moment.
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