Santa Fe-based health tech company wins Ski Lift Pitch competition

Karen Crow couldn’t stop herself from wanting to know more about her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and her son’s sleep disorder, her Type A personality getting the best of her.

“That’s when I realized that there was a very powerful intersection between sleep science and neuroscience,” said Crow, the CEO and co-founder of NeuroGeneces. “Sleep is the window into the brain, and it really gives you all these insights on how the brain is functioning and working.”

Crow, who founded the company in 2021 with Dr. Jason Worchel, a neuropsychiatrist, won the 10th annual Ski Lift Pitch competition Tuesday, besting two other finalists focused on managing wildfire risks and data connectors for school districts.

The competition, held at Taos Ski Valley and hosted by CNM Ingenuity, Central New Mexico Community College’s technology and innovation arm, is a unique concept in the world of pitching business ideas. Representatives from nine startups skied down the slopes with local and national investors Tuesday, including the New Mexico Angels and Roadrunner Venture Studios, to explain why their ideas have high growth potential.

The list was whittled down to three finalists by the end of Tuesday: Evress, Firescape and the winner, NeuroGeneces, which made five-minute pitches to finalist judges who included New Mexico Outdoor Recreation Division Director Karina Armijo and about a half dozen others.

Armijo, whose division is part of the state’s Economic Development Department, said choosing a winner from the group of finalists was “a tough decision.”

“It was really interesting and just timely for all three of those pitches,” Armijo said.

Crow’s pitch touched on the validation and traction of its products, which include a sleep headband that patients would wear that acts as a cardiac monitor. The headband tracks the brain age of a patient by collecting over 400 neuro biomarkers while someone sleeps.

Then, Crow said, a report is created that looks at “what are the modifiable things that you can do — that an individual can do — to have the greatest impact on their brain age.” It’s then given to a patient’s physician.

“Fifty percent of neurodegeneration can be modified if you do even simple behavioral changes … early enough,” Crow said. “What we do is look at the electrical circuitry in your brain, which is the source code. Changes will occur there long before they ever show up as a cognitive symptom or some other derivative symptom.

“We look at the source code, we see when things are working, or they’re not working, and that gives the doctor an objective measure of how the brain is working.”

Crow said NeuroGeneces, which has two granted patents and three continuation pending patents for its technology, has been partnering with concierge primary care physicians to begin offering its products upon release later this year.

The company is using the $10,000 in winnings to cover those patent fees, Crow said.