Wavelet Medical lands ARPA-H grant to validate fetal brain-monitoring tech
What's the deal? Wavelet MedicalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has secured a grant of up to $2.14M from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → to validate its fetal brain monitoring technology.
The New York startup is building the first non-invasive, AI-powered fetal electroencephalography (EEG) platform to detect brain distress in real time and prevent avoidable injury at birth.
Founded by Liz Golden, Dr. Emily Lee, and Dr. Jose Cortes-Briones, Wavelet captures EEG through the mother's abdomen and reconstructs signals with proprietary AI — no invasive scalp electrodes required.
Why now? The 12-month award begins in June 2026. ARPA-H, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, was set up in 2022 to fund high-impact health research that traditional channels cannot easily support.
The need is acute. Each year in the US, more than 35,000 infants suffer brain injuries at birth, and roughly one-third of deliveries are caesarean sections.
For decades, obstetrics has leaned on fetal heart rate monitoring, which does not directly measure neurological function and is indeterminate in up to 85% of births.
That gap drives missed cases of hypoxia leading to lifelong disability, plus unnecessary C-sections from false positives.
What could go wrong? The technology is still early. Wavelet is testing at three clinical sites and preparing for expanded trials.
Reconstructing fetal brain signals through the abdomen with AI is technically hard, and the platform must prove reliable across diverse births before it can challenge the existing standard of care.
The signal: The award reflects ARPA-H's mandate, as a government and non-profit funder set up in 2022, to back high-risk health research that struggles to attract conventional capital — a fit for an early-stage company like Wavelet that is still validating its technology across just three clinical sites. Non-dilutive grant funding gives the startup runway to prove its AI-powered EEG platform before facing the commercial scrutiny of private investors.
Image credit: Wavelet Medical
Read more: PR Newswire
