Source: University of Auckland, CIE Newsroom
Celebrating the success of Neurofanos: team members Alireza Sharifzadeh-Kermani, Jiantao Shen and Tony Cuiat the Blues Awards.
One year ago, Neurofanos was announced as the overall winner of the 2022 Velocity $100k Challenge and the entrepreneurial journey for this multidisciplinary team of biomedical engineers, neurosurgeons, researchers, and academics was launched. Their winning innovation is a revolutionary AI-driven tool capable of measuring and analysing the structure of the brain in real time. It is a technological advancement with the potential to support neurosurgeons to perform more accurate surgeries, leading to improved patient safety.
The Velocity $100k Challenge, delivered by the University of Auckland Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), awarded the Neurofanos team $25,000 in seed capital. However, the more valuable part of the prize package was the CIE Venture Lab incubation programme. Venture Lab aims to provide all the winning ventures with the support they need to take their plans to the next level and includes mentorship from an experienced entrepreneur. “Getting advice on how to best organise the project and the team, all while obtaining a vision to set ourselves up for long-term success, was extremely valuable,” says Dr Hamid Abbasi, Co-Founder and CEO of Neurofanos.