The biggest thing in Spirit Tech this week

iris labs launches AI thought partner with $20M

iris labs launches with $20M in funding from Flagship Pioneering.

Its first product, iris chat, is an AI thought partner designed to help people build meaningful relationships and live with greater purpose and fulfillment. Through text message conversations, iris chat learns about each user's experiences, priorities, and aspirations so it can better guide people toward the life they want to build.

The parent org, Flagship Pioneering, has started 100+ ventures since 2000, and directs $14B in assets. And while most of its ventures cluster in biotech (e.g., Moderna), iris labs is seeking to use AI to promote human flourishing. This investment is a positive signal for the Spirit Tech sector, as it provides more momentum for applying modern tools to help people find meaning and purpose in ways that are just now possible.

Also this week

Ultrasound as a new interface for the mind

Bridge Neurotech left stealth with $13.5 million for a brain-computer interface (BCI) that uses ultrasound to read the brain, without surgery or implants.

The underlying technique is functional ultrasound imaging, or fUSI. The device sends ultrasound through the skull, measures the blood flow changes that follow neural activity, and uses AI to decode them.

Founder Will Biederman designed the chip used in Neuralink's first implants. Neuralink, and its implanted BCIs, have limited reach as the use cases are clinical and require an invasive medical procedure. Biederman sees potential for functional ultrasound imaging to be a game-changer if they do it non-invasively.

His case for ultrasound is that it has now decoded neural activity "at resolutions fMRI cannot achieve", through openings in the skull. The skull interface presents a technical challenge as every person's skull absorbs and scatters sound a bit differently, and functional ultrasound imaging has yet to accurately read through intact bone.

To help understand how to overcome this challenge, Bridge's first study is enrolling people with plastic skull implants alongside healthy volunteers.

If it works, functional ultrasound imaging could sense the deeper structures of the brain that are not reachable with the current consumer EEG headbands. And since many of the neurocorrelates of meditation and contemplative practice sit within these deeper structures, this technology can permit novel research and understanding to bring science and spirituality closer together without expecting people to meditate in MRI machines.

USC to test if mindfulness and psilocybin are better together

A USC team won up to $4M for EVIDENT-MAP, a trial of 80 adults with depression and no prior experience of psychedelics or meditation. The study will test whether mindfulness training can enhance and help sustain the benefits of psychedelic therapy.

Half of the study participants will receive psilocybin therapy alone, and half will receive psilocybin therapy plus an eight-week mindfulness meditation course. Both study groups will get preparatory psychotherapy and integration sessions.

EEG, MRI, saliva, blood, stool, and wearable data will be measured throughout to understand if and how the physiology shifts.

The researchers hypothesize that mindfulness training stacked with psychedelic therapy will help patients integrate the experience and sustain clinical improvements afterwards. If this proves to be true, there will be even more evidence to motivate the use of complementary practices that build on each other in beneficial ways.

Company Spotlights

• Swa:aha: Meditation and wellness app that blends Vedic practices with modern mind training. Used by 1 million+ users, it features a library of 900 sleep and meditation sessions, an AI chat companion and a digital mala for chanting.

Explore our Spirit Tech Organizations directory, a living map of 500+ orgs we track and update weekly.

New Jobs This Week

• AI Safety Manager @ Slingshot AI: Lead trust and safety for Ash, "the first AI designed for mental health" - setting safety policy, investigating user reports, and building the response processes behind an AI therapist. London.
• Senior Business Data Analyst @ Ingenio: Measure financial, product, and marketing performance across the European brands of Ingenio, the company behind Keen and 20+ spiritual and emotional-wellness marketplaces. Paris (hybrid).

Browse the Spirit Tech jobs board for more roles, or to post one at your organization.

New from the Community

• Pragmatic Dharma: A Buddhist meditation app featuring free guided talks and meditations, live facilitated multiplayer meditations, and AI-driven personalized recommendations. Founded by Buddhist Geeks co-founder Vince Horn.

Check out a variety of other new ideas and products across Spirit Tech.