Most Indian AI startups are racing to build chatbots for Indic languages. Dr. Siddharth Panwar took a different bet, building India's first non-invasive brain-computer interface on 60,000 hours of EEG data that hospitals were about to throw away.

Trained at Stanford as an electrical engineer and forged at IIT Delhi as a brain scientist, Dr. Siddharth Panwar spent ten years sitting outside neurologists' rooms collecting EEG data that nobody else wanted. That patience became NeuroDx.ai, the deeptech startup behind MANAS-1, India's first 400-million-parameter brain foundation model trained on 60,000 hours of EEG signals from over 25,000 patients.

In conversation with host Akshay Datt, Siddharth explains why the West gave up on EEG too soon, why a non-invasive brain-computer interface can capture 80 percent of Neuralink's value at a fraction of the cost, and why Indian VCs still struggle to underwrite frontier scientific risk in AI neurodiagnostics. Selected as one of twelve IndiaAI Mission sovereign AI champions, NeuroDx is the only physiological foundation model in the cohort, arriving exactly as Indian deeptech enters its sovereign AI moment.

👉How Siddharth Panwar built India's first 400-million-parameter brain foundation model, MANAS-1, with zero institutional VC on the cap table

👉Why the Western medical system gave up on EEG and how AI foundation models are bringing it back into clinical relevance

👉What separates MANAS-1 from Neuralink, and why a non-invasive brain-computer interface scales to populations that brain surgery never can

👉How NeuroDx aggregated 60,000 hours of EEG data from 25,000 patients by salvaging signals that hospitals were deleting every month

👉Why being selected as 1 of 12 IndiaAI Mission sovereign AI champions changes the financial and policy economics of building deeptech in India

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00:00 - Introduction

00:02:14 - What Brain Computer Interface Really Means

00:03:09 - Non-Invasive Alternative to Neuralink

00:04:11 - EEG: India's Forgotten Diagnostic Edge

00:13:36 - EEG as the Language of Brain

00:16:19 - MANAS-1: India's Brain Foundation Model

00:21:02 - 400 Million Parameters Explained Simply

00:30:09 - Inside the IndiaAI Mission Selection

00:35:00 - Bootstrapping a Frontier AI Lab

00:49:19 - Why $10M is India's Biggest Test

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Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the speaker, not necessarily the channel