Interview with Firefly Neuroscience CEO Greg Lipschitz
Guest
CEO of Firefly Neuroscience
Greg Lipschitz has served as Firefly Neuroscience's CEO since March 2025, having previously been a board director since December 2022. He brings extensive experience in private equity, investment banking, capital markets, and finance to his leadership role. As Managing Director of Old Stone Advisors and former Vice President of Lazer Capital, Greg has advised on over $1 billion in transactions. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst.
Key Learnings From Greg's Experience
Test for clinical urgency before going all in — and look for physician skin in the game. The strongest signal that an idea is worth pursuing is when doctors are so enthusiastic they invest their own money, not just offer advisory equity. Combine this with favorable asymmetry between the clinical pain you're solving and the technical risk you're taking on, plus optimal market timing where your space is ripe for transformation.
Diversify your funding strategy beyond traditional VC to extend runway and build credibility. Systematic pursuit of non-dilutive capital, such as grants, builds organizational rigor while giving you credibility and a head start with venture investors by demonstrating external validation and reducing their risk. Modern tools like LLMs make grant writing more accessible, and the psychological impact on VCs is significant — they see execution capability and the potential to double their dollar.
Accept the tension between precision and speed — and develop practices to manage the emotional toll. Building devices that go inside the human body demands uncompromising rigor, but startups still require speed and iteration. This discomfort isn’t temporary. It’s part of the job, and managing it well is just as important as the technical work.
How do you know if you're building a company — or an expensive science project?
It's the fundamental question every medtech founder faces, yet most lack a reliable framework for answering it. The stakes couldn't be higher — pursue the wrong opportunity and you'll spend years chasing regulatory approval for technology the market doesn't want. Choose wisely, and you could transform patient care while building a thriving business.
Joanna Nathan has learned to tell the difference. As CEO and co-founder of Prana Surgical, she's building an image-guided, minimally invasive surgical platform designed to make lung cancer treatment more precise by conserving healthy tissue and enabling personalized treatment plans.
But her path to founding Prana wasn't linear.
Joanna's career began in translational research at Texas Heart Institute. From there, she moved into product development at Saranas, learning firsthand what it takes to bring innovative technologies from concept to commercial reality. Her perspective expanded dramatically during stints as an investor — first at Mercury Fund, then as New Ventures Manager at Johnson & Johnson's Center for Device Innovation.
This unique vantage point — having sat on both sides of the funding table — taught Joanna to distinguish between compelling science and viable business opportunities. While at J&J, she identified what would become Prana as a rare alignment of the key factors she looks for in breakthrough medtech ventures.
As Prana nears first-in-human studies with $12 million in funding, Joanna’s method for evaluating medtech innovation is proving to be a reliable guide. Her approach combines clinical validation, strategic resource allocation, and the psychological resilience required to build life-critical devices.
Sponsor Message
We recently released the seventh volume of Medsider Mentors, which summarizes key learnings from the most popular Medsider interviews over the last six months.
Keeping up with every Medsider interview isn’t easy. That’s why we created Medsider Mentors. These e-book volumes distill the best practices and insider secrets from top founders and CEOs, all in a downloadable, easy-to-digest format.
Check out the latest volume here. All-Access members get every volume for free, including access to all Medsider Courses, too.
Who You Raise From > How Much You Raise
Drawing from over 15 years in capital markets before stepping into the CEO role, Greg emphasizes a fundamental truth that many founders overlook: who you raise money from really matters.
"It's not just the amount of capital that you raise, but it's also who your investors are and the terms that you raise them on," Greg explains. He's witnessed countless companies struggle when investors can't support subsequent rounds, leaving founders constantly fundraising instead of building their businesses. "My advice is to really try to find the right long-term partners that can help you strategically build your business versus getting too stuck on valuation."
This philosophy extends to team building, where Greg advocates for assembling multidisciplinary expertise rather than trying to master every domain personally. "Healthcare is just way too complicated for one person," he notes. For founder-led companies where the CEO's expertise lies in clinical science rather than finance, Greg recommends bringing on partners who can handle the capital markets while founders focus on their core strengths.
The rationale is practical: "Capital raising is a full-time job," Greg says, making it nearly impossible for clinical founders to excel at both domains simultaneously.
For companies that don't fit the traditional venture capital mold, Greg suggests exploring alternative paths. When Firefly encountered VCs using "cookie-cutter" approaches that didn't account for the company's unique ten-year database development timeline, the team pivoted to non-traditional funding sources.
Non-Traditional Funding: Strategic Growth Through Public Markets and Smart Acquisitions
Firefly's approach to going public through a reverse merger demonstrates how companies can pursue alternative paths when traditional routes don't align with their circumstances. The company completed a $45 million reverse merger with IT group WaveDancer in August 2024, allowing it to access public markets without the uncertainty of traditional IPO timing. Greg notes that with conventional IPOs, companies must complete all documentation and then hope market conditions are favorable during their specific launch window, which can create significant timing risk.
"We went public through the reverse merger because it gave us the cleanest path…and predictability of knowing we'll go public at a certain date," Greg explains.
The public structure has enabled strategic moves like the May 2025 Evoke Neuroscience acquisition, a $6 million deal paid 50% in cash and 50% in Firefly stock that created "the largest known proprietary database of >180,000 standardized EEG/ERP assessment records" and expanded commercial sites ten-fold. The acquisition demonstrates how public companies can use equity as acquisition currency more effectively than private entities.
"The back story is Firefly did an excellent job building the database and the algorithms and really understanding the brain. Evoke did an excellent job of building a network into all these clinicians in the US. So, you had two of the biggest EEG/ERP databases out there,” Greg says of the strategic rationale for merging. The combined entity now holds 27 granted patents and serves over 60 commercial users, positioning Firefly to build what Greg describes as a foundation model for the human brain.
The deal structure also illustrates sophisticated thinking about risk sharing, including "a $500,000 earn-out to be paid in stock upon Evoke's acquired business achieving at least $3 million in annualized revenues within the next three years", aligning both parties' interests around growth execution.
How to Pick Your Priorities When Everything Looks Like an Opportunity
For platform companies like Firefly, having multiple potential applications can be both a blessing and a strategic challenge. With a proprietary database covering over a dozen cognitive disorders — from concussions and depression to dementia and ADHD — the team faces constant decisions about where to focus its resources.
As Greg put it, “There are 20 different directions we could take, but which one is going to get us the best return on investment in both the short-term and the long-term?”
Greg's approach to this challenge centers on disciplined prioritization. "The exciting part about Firefly, and maybe the weakness as well, is that we have such a big opportunity," he explains. Rather than trying to pursue every possible application simultaneously, the company has chosen to concentrate on neurology, specifically dementia care, as their initial primary focus.
The rationale behind this choice reflects both market dynamics and demographic trends. "We have this big baby boomer generation…one of the key things that they think about is their brain," Greg notes. This demographic shift creates a substantial and growing market for brain health technologies, making dementia a natural starting point for commercial expansion.
However, Greg emphasizes that this focused approach doesn't mean ignoring other opportunities. Instead, the strategy involves letting market signals guide future expansion. "As we keep building out our network of clinicians and keep getting more data, we want the market to pull us and tell us, 'Hey, here's all these exciting ways to grow,'" he explains.
This market-driven approach allows the company to evaluate multiple directions systematically rather than spreading its resources too thin.
The underlying philosophy is sequential execution rather than parallel development. "We have to focus," Greg emphasizes. "If we execute and do really well on our first initiative, then the market will enable us to keep growing, giving us the privilege to then work on the second, the third, and the fourth."
The Evoke acquisition has added another dimension to these strategic considerations. Beyond the clinical applications, the deal brought a consumer-focused brain training app that allows users to control games through brain signals rather than traditional controllers. The app “is like a gym for your brain,” Greg says, explaining that it can help users learn how to de-stress or to focus. While the team continues strategizing the best approach to monetize this consumer asset, it represents another potential avenue for growth as the broader market for brain health monitoring expands beyond clinical settings.
The Snowball Approach: Building Commercial Momentum Step by Step
Firefly's commercialization strategy reflects the unique challenges of introducing AI-powered diagnostics into healthcare settings. With the company now active in 60 clinics across the U.S., Greg's approach centers on methodical growth while maintaining close relationships with early adopters.
"Our commercialization plan is now just focused on sales and marketing. How do we grow that as fast and sustainably as we can?" Greg explains. The strategy involves two parallel tracks: expanding to new accounts while deepening relationships with existing customers. This dual approach recognizes that in healthcare, proving value with current users often provides the strongest foundation for broader adoption.
Rather than pursuing rapid expansion at any cost, the team prioritizes learning from its existing customer base. "Part of that process is reaching out and educating the market and finding new accounts, but then also working with existing accounts to say, 'What do you like about the technology? Where do you see the most value? Where can we improve?'" Greg notes.
This customer feedback loop helps drive product development decisions. By working closely with clinicians to identify the most valuable features, Firefly can enhance their offering before approaching new prospects. "Really working with that core customer base to say, 'Hey, if we added one more feature to the report or one more insight, what would that look like and how excited would you get?' So we can use that to then get into many more accounts," Greg explains.
The company has chosen a direct sales approach rather than working through distributors, a decision that reflects their current stage and the complexity of their technology. "We have a direct sales team. And I think for a company of our size, that's critical because it really allows you to build solid relationships with our customers," Greg says. As the company scales, this approach may evolve, but the current focus remains on building deep partnerships with early adopters.
Scientific validation remains crucial for healthcare adoption. Continuous research publication is critical: "When you're dealing in healthcare, a lot of people say, 'Okay, this sounds great. Show me the data and show me the proof.' For us, it's making sure our science team is focused on research and publications for a specific use case," says Greg.
This creates what Greg describes as a "snowball effect" where clinical success, published evidence, and customer testimonials combine to accelerate adoption. Healthcare sales cycles tend to be longer and require more evidence than typical technology sales, but early success can compound rapidly once credibility is established.
Looking Ahead: Building a ‘ChatGPT’ For Brain Health
Firefly's acceptance into the NVIDIA Connect program represents a significant step toward building a foundation AI model of the human brain. "The most valuable asset that Firefly is going to have over time is the database," Greg explains, drawing parallels to how large language models like ChatGPT transformed artificial intelligence.
The NVIDIA partnership provides access to advanced software development resources that could accelerate Firefly's AI capabilities. As Greg envisions it, the growing database could eventually integrate with other data sources like cardiac EKGs or electronic medical records, unlocking new insights about brain function. The platform has already demonstrated value through pharmaceutical partnerships, including Arrivo BioVentures' study on treatments for major depressive disorder, showcasing the practical applications of objective brain health measurement in drug development.
Sponsor Message
After raising over $50M from corporate venture and cardiovascular key opinion leaders, FastWave Medical has progressed rapidly in the development of its next-generation intravascular lithotripsy (IVL) systems for complex calcific disease.
The market size for IVL is over $10 billion and the only player in the space was acquired for over $13 billion in 2024. So naturally, there’s a lot of investor interest in FastWave.
Given the continued demand to invest in FastWave, their team has opened up an investor waitlist for anyone interested in potentially owning a piece of the company.
The last time FastWave opened up a private placement, it closed $11 million in two weeks. So if you’re interested in investing in one of the hottest cardiovascular startups, opt into their investor waitlist here.
