BRAINBox Solutions, the Richmond, Virginia-based diagnostics company building a blood-based test for concussion, has secured strategic financing from Pivotal Capital Partners and New Horizon Bank to accelerate development of point-of-care and lab-based versions of its concussion diagnostic and prognostic test. The company hasn’t disclosed the size of the round, which combines equity funding with credit facilities.
A Blood Test That Also Reads the Brain
BRAINBox describes its product as the first AI-enabled, multi-modality approach to diagnosing and predicting outcomes from mild traumatic brain injury, better known as concussion. The core of it is a panel of proprietary blood biomarkers that can be read either on a point-of-care instrument or on standard laboratory systems, paired with a digital neurocognitive testing platform. Combined, the two feed into an AI algorithm that produces a single composite TBI score, an approach meant to give clinicians something more objective than symptom checklists and subjective assessments, which is still how most concussions get evaluated today.
What the New Money Is Actually For
This financing is specifically earmarked for hardware and software development on the point-of-care side of that platform, along with acquiring the pilot instruments needed to keep building it out. That’s a meaningful shift in emphasis: a test that only runs on standard laboratory equipment is limited to settings with a lab on-site, while a true point-of-care version can move into emergency departments, urgent care clinics, ambulances, nursing homes, and athletic facilities, anywhere a concussion might actually be evaluated in the first place. CEO Donna Edmonds tied the financing directly to that ambition: “Development of a PoC device is an important dimension of our strategy, which is to provide the test in hospital laboratories as well [as] in other settings such as clinics, ambulances, emergency departments, nursing homes, and athletic facilities.”
The Data Behind the Bet
The financing follows a non-exclusive development agreement with Prolight Diagnostics, a diagnostics company whose Psyros platform uses single-molecule counting to detect very low concentrations of biomarkers from a small blood sample, the kind of sensitivity a point-of-care concussion test needs to work outside a lab. That agreement grew out of a feasibility study in which Prolight evaluated 260 patient samples pulled from BRAINBox’s HeadSMART II pivotal trial, running three concussion assays on the Psyros platform. The results, per BRAINBox, demonstrated excellent performance. Edmonds credited that data directly for making the new financing possible: “The financing reflects the progress we have made in delivering excellent performance in a proprietary assay format, including through our collaboration with Prolight Diagnostics that has demonstrated its Psyro® PoC platform’s suitability for our TBI test as well as other products in our neurology portfolio.” HeadSMART II itself is BRAINBox’s pivotal, multi-site trial, run across Level I trauma centers, emergency departments, and urgent care settings, built to reflect how concussion actually gets evaluated in real practice rather than in a controlled study environment.
A Richmond Company With Ties Up the I-95 Corridor
BRAINBox has built its funding history on a mix of Virginia-specific and national backers, including a Series A round and later investment from Virginia Venture Partners, part of the state’s Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation. The company’s regional ties extend beyond Virginia’s borders, too: Edmonds also serves as Vice Chair of the board at BioHealth Innovation, the nonprofit that helps drive commercialization across Maryland’s BioHealth Capital Region, putting a Richmond-based diagnostics company at the leadership table of one of the mid-Atlantic’s other major life sciences hubs. For a company still working toward a point-of-care product and the regulatory clearance that will eventually have to come with it, financing that specifically funds the hardware and instrumentation stage is a concrete sign of how close BRAINBox believes it is to a test clinicians can actually use where concussions happen, not just where blood gets drawn.
