Hi. My name is Steven.
I spent my childhood running around outside and asking questions about the world.
My parents bought me American books so I could learn like American children.
I fell in love with philosophy; then physics; then computer science; and building stuff with my hands.
And that’s all you really need to know about me.
One Sunday afternoon, I read a paper about a niche neurostimulation concept called Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation — the act of sending electrical currents through the head to generate hallucinations of motion. And I thought it would be amazing to have something like this for video games. Just imagine: playing a spaceship game or flying an FPV drone or TitanFall; and feeling every movement in your soul!!
At the time (and still today), the field was full of skeptics. People argued that it could never actually be used to create a commercializable product. I didn’t like their reasons very much.
Theorem 1.0 when something is really awesome and there is no good reason not to do it, you should do it.
So I went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of sponges and batteries; and started building my own brain stimulation systems. And, within a week, I was convinced that we could make this thing work.
A few months into building, I told my friend Colton about what I was making — and what it could mean for the world. He left his dream-job (building jet-engines), and we started working together.
Colton is a much better engineer than me. So he built the hardware while I asked questions about how the brain works. This must’ve been quite a lethal combination, because — within a few months — we built the most powerful vestibular stimulation rig in the world.
We called it the Jankatron (because it looked really janky).
We actually plugged this thing to our brains.
Even though it looked messy, we had a proof-of-concept. We had the “zero-to-one.” And we could show people and blow their minds. And we showed a LOT of people. One of those people was David Brillembourg.
David runs a sci-fi/gaming VC fund called Dune Ventures. He’s the only general partner, makes very few investments, and they are all in really awesome companies. And so we met with him even though we weren’t planning on taking his money (because we figured “all VCs are evil”). He spoke with us twice on Zoom. Then he drove down to DC.
He convinced us to take VC funding. Then he convinced us to take his VC funding. And also to drop out of school.
I will say, Colton is 21 and I'm BARELY still a teenager.
And that brings us to... now!
We are a bunch of curious, obsessive, relentless kids.
We have awesome tech; and $750k to turn it into an amazing product.
We are on a mission: to make magic, at an industrial scale.
And we want you to join us.