I’ve interviewed hundreds of startup founders since I moved to Israel – but none quite like Yaron Segal.

He’s come up with an incredible idea (not unusual in the Startup Nation). He’s turned that idea into real, marketable product (again, not unusual).

And now he’s leaving the company he founded 14 years ago – and which has attracted over $50m in funding – because his need to carry on innovating is so much greater than pursuing a payday “exit” (this is highly unusual).

Yaron invented a “brainwave helmet” that helps patients recover after a stroke. Experts said it was a crazy idea and would never work.

Clinical trials proved them wrong. Patients learned to walk again, to feed themselves, to bathe themselves, and to go the bathroom by themselves, by wearing Yaron’s helmet for 40 minutes a day.

It creates a magnetic field that literally mends the broken links – long considered unfixable – between brain cells. Or forges links that were never there in the first place.

“Neuroplasticity” is the term that describes the brain’s ability to change and adapt throughout a person’s life and reorganize its structure, functions and connections in response to new experiences, learning or environmental changes.

But that couldn’t happen fully in damaged parts of the brain where there........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)