Welcome to the 'brain gym': DIY neurotech is now in India, no prescription required

**Sudeshna Ray** (0:02)
When was the last time that you thought about your brain? I'm not talking about heart, your weight, your actual brain.
If you ask me, I would say, honestly, I don't remember.
And to think that this thing is actually running the whole show for us, and is also usually the first thing to suffer when things get too stressful.
Today, I'm going to read you a report by my colleague Sudeshna Ray about a startup that thinks it can fix that. With a headset that pipes a tiny electrical current into your skull to dial down stress. There's no prescription or doctor. It is sold like a pair of earphones. Sudeshna even strapped one on herself at a cafe while sipping coffee. What happened next is worth hearing about.
Last week, I sat in a cafe wearing a black goggle-like headset perched on my forehead that could have come straight out of the Jetsons. Except Mave, as the headset is called, was sending 2 mA of electrical signals to the front of my brain and was intended to reduce stress.
The technology we are building is about dialing into cognitive states, said Dhaval Jain, co-founder and CEO of Mave Health. He sat across the table from me and had earlier pulled out a boomerang-shaped case from his backpack. Inside it was the headset which came with two trapezoid saline-soaked sponges, electrodes to send low-intensity currents into the brain.
Mave uses transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, the same technology that has been used to treat stroke, migraine and psychiatric disorders for decades. It is designed to work over time with repeated sessions slowly nudging the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for focus, emotion management and rationalization to better regulation.
All this was now sitting on my head and I was starting to feel a light tingling sensation. Still, it was nothing like what I had expected a medical device to look or feel like. Nor was it anything like meditating in silence to reduce stress. I was sipping coffee and talking about the device while using it. As Jane would later tell me, that was the entire point. Mave Health, the neurotech company that makes the headset, is based out of Bangalore and San Francisco and was founded in 2023 It has, until now, raised $2.85 million from investors like Bloom Ventures, All In Capital and Stanford Angels. Their flagship device has been available in the Indian and US markets since January and costs almost 30,000 rupees. The company initially beta-tested the device with more than 500 Indian users, all reached through word of mouth. Since the official launch in January 2026, Jain claimed it has sold several hundred devices in India.
Mave's headset also sits below the regulatory threshold, requiring clinical trials or a doctor's prescription. The Central Drug Standard Control Organization or CDSCO, India's medical device regulator, does not have to sign off on it. It is a consumer electronic product, Jain said. When I first put it on, I was prepared to feel nothing. Most first-time users notice very little. But surprisingly, I was starting to notice quite a lot. I was a bit more intentional about every observation, oscillating between hyperfocus and being phased out. And I couldn't help wondering what just happened to my brain? How do people feel after a few weeks of using something like this? And who is monitoring their long-term brain health? Above all though, something about a device that sends electrical currents into the brain being sold in the same category as earphones didn't sit right with me.
Earlier this year, I wrote about preventive health in India, and I have been thinking a lot about my own health status quo since then. How is my heart doing? Could I get cancer? How do you get something early? My brain was not on that list. The brain is the most neglected organ in a screening, said a preventive health specialist of a top hospital in India. Its treatment is reactive, meaning people only bother coming in when something serious happens. Mental health suffers from the same problem. And unlike many other conditions, there are no surgical fixes for it. It is a mismatch between the human brain and modern life, according to Jen. Current lifestyles have sprung beyond what the evolved brain can handle, said the preventive health specialist. So it is always overwhelmed and unable to process daily inputs. Mental health is ignored, she added, or band-aided with antidepressants. India, where nearly 1 in 20 adults lives with depression, writes over 30 million antidepressant prescriptions in a year for mental health. Most of these are hush-hush and taken only when the conditions get severe. While depression has been rising for decades, the way we deal with it largely hasn't. In the brain, it is the prefrontal cortex that bears much of this burden. And it is exactly where Mave's headset works. The global neurostimulation tech market is worth well over $5 billion, according to reports. In India, it is valued at a few hundred million, with segments such as spinal cord and deep brain stimulators leading. So far, it has been a market that has catered to treating serious injuries. And Mave's headset is a preventive care device that sits somewhere between improving mental health and biohacking.