Saccade

Saccade Health is building a hardware-and-software platform for early Alzheimer's detection by analysing saccadic eye movements—the rapid, involuntary jumps the eye makes between focus points. Its patent-pending attachment clips onto commercially available VR headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, using NIR cameras and custom electronics to capture eye-tracking data during a 15-minute, neurologist-designed assessment, which a machine learning model then scores against clinical baselines.

Research suggests saccadic abnormalities can appear up to 15 years before cognitive symptoms, yet standard tools like MRI typically only become useful once symptoms show. With VR headsets now consumer hardware, the company argues the moment is right to turn them into a cheap, non-invasive screening front-end.

Founded in 2026 in San Francisco and part of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch, Saccade is going after the earliest detectable biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease. Founder and CEO Shreyas Bhardwaj brings previous experience building medical devices and in soft robotics research.

The company says its tasks are designed by neurologists, and it's pursuing pilot studies and IRB approvals with institutions such as UC Santa Barbara and Cottage Health to benchmark against MRI. Bhardwaj's medical-device and soft-robotics background is relevant to the hardware challenge at the core of the product.