From Smart Headbands To Mood-Altering Headphones: Inside Neuphony’s Pivot To Sychedelic

The consumer wearable space has grown into a behemoth. If smartwatches were the first sign, then Apple Watch took it to the next level and these days wearables are everywhere — from your face to even your ears. 

Ria Rustagi and Bhavya Madan, founders of the healthtech startup Neuphony identified this burgeoning opportunity early. The company started out trying to address fitness and wellness tracking through smart headbands. 

But today the startup has morphed into Sychedelic, a smart headphone manufacturer that is looking to capitalise on the growing healthtech obsession in India.   

A pair of Sychedelic headphones is not only a device for listening to music or podcasts, according to the husband-wife founder duo. The startup’s vision is to become a health assistant for users to manage mental health concerns such as stress, anxiety, and sleeping disorders. 

Each pair of Sychedelic headphones features PPG (photoplethysmography) sensors, allowing users to track their heart rate. 

While mental health continues to be a taboo subject in India, it remains a critical issue affecting millions globally. A report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2025 states that more than one billion people are affected by depression and anxiety, which can often lead to self-harm or death by suicides when left unaddressed. 

But can a pair of smart headphones really be the answer? 

Despite the intriguing concept, the startup has made some ambitious claims. These include the headphone’s “boost feature”, which users can supposedly activate to sleep better, relax, manage anxiety, and even enhance productivity—all within 20 minutes. 

The Delhi NCR-based startup states it uses transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) to stimulate brain activity via electrical currents. However, it remains to be seen whether these claims hold up or are simply the latest addition to a growing list of tech-driven fads.

Learnings From A Failed Product

The husband-wife duo’s first brush with entrepreneurship came in 2020, when they launched Neuphony. This startup emerged out of Rustagi’s personal struggles with grieving the loss of a loved one due to an undiagnosed neurological condition. 

This personal loss made her realise that the Indian healthcare market desperately needs solutions that can detect anomalies at an early stage and address them through the right interventions. 

Under the Neuphony brand, the founders introduced a neurofeedback headband equipped with EEG (electroencephalography) sensors to measure the brain’s electrical activity. The headband enabled users to track indicators of brain health, such as stress and anxiety, through electrical nodes.

After commencing operations, Neuphony raised INR 5 Cr (about $560K) from IIM Ahmedabad, Venture Centre, and others. Yet, even with investor validation, the product struggled to scale up. Some might say it was a bit ahead of its time. 

With the likes of Temple, BioPeak and other new healthtech models emerging in the past year, Neuphony was a precursor to the ongoing healthtech 2.0 movement in India.

“Neuphony was meant to be a D2C brand, but somehow ended up being B2B,” said Rustagi.

It evolved into a B2B product because that’s where the adoption was coming from. The device attracted interest primarily from researchers, universities, and entities involved in long-term projects related to neurological health.

The startup also struggled to build credibility among consumers because users from research labs and organisations were unable to provide testimonials about its efficacy due to confidentiality clauses. 

Plus, research projects often take years to be completed and published, which restricted Neuphony from using its institutional partners as evidence of the product’s success. Rustagi also shared that many celebrities used the product but declined to publicly share their experiences. “If I don’t tell others who I’m working with, how will new people buy my product?” the cofounder said.

Did this have something to do with the stigma surrounding mental health and wellness in India? That’s not clear, but without word-of-mouth Neuphony tanked. 

Four years into operations, the company only brought in INR 1.6 Cr in revenue by FY24, with a loss of INR 3.8 Cr.

It was a setback that the founders did not expect, but their focus was clearly on taking this to the next level. Alongside winding down their company, the duo had already started working on a new idea that would eventually become Sychedelic.

The Technology Behind Sychedelic

During their struggle in scaling up Neuphony, the founders frequently received feedback from users who did not simply want to measure their stress levels, but they wanted to intervene. More users were asking for actionable insights to resolve teething issues. 

This prompted the duo to explore how to build actionable interventions within their hardware. “Even before we shut the Neuphony product, people shared feedback saying that they already know they are stressed in many cases, so they wanted a device that would solve the problem and not just reiterate it,” Rustagi told Inc42.

In 2023, the founders met Olympic gold medallist Abhinav Bindra, who introduced them to a Pulsed Electromagnetic Field (PEMF) device. PEMF is a non-invasive therapeutic tool that sends low-frequency electromagnetic pulses to the muscle tissue for healing and pain relief.

The neuromodulation idea stayed with the founders, even after Neuphony. Lack of funds held them back from delving deeper into this space. 

Then in 2024, the founders secured INR 10 Cr (about $1.1 Mn) from a major angel investor, allowing them to begin developing Sychedelic and move on from Neuphony. 

Influenced by PEMF, Rustagi and Madan travelled to the United States to study the broader field of neuromodulation, consulting with experts to understand various methods and their applications. After weeks of research, the founders chose to work with the TDCS technique, integrated within a consumer electronic product — in this case, headphones.

TDCS is a neuromodulation method used to stimulate brain activity. 

Sychedelic’s headphones feature electrodes placed on the headband that deliver direct current through the user’s scalp to modulate brain activity. These electrodes activate when the user switches to ‘boost mode’ via the mobile app. By modulating different parts of the brain, this technique is intended to support deep sleep, reduce anxiety, and enhance focus.

But returning to the critical question—is the technique actually effective?

Real Science Vs ‘Magic Tech’ 

Multiple studies have examined the impact of neuromodulation techniques on mental health disorders. A study published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US concluded that TDCS improves clinical symptoms of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and anxiety disorders (AD), with effects lasting up to a month. 

However, the long-term impacts remain unclear. Most of these studies have not been conducted over decades, and using TDCS or similar techniques could involve long-term risks which have not yet been ascertained. 

For instance, another study found the impact of TDCS on treating insomnia to be uncertain, noting that its “application scope in clinical practice is limited”.

Despite these mixed findings, Sychedelic claims an efficacy rate of 92% on its website, even as the product continues to undergo clinical testing. Beyond efficacy, the pricing of the device may pose a significant challenge for the startup as it attempts to scale.

Sychedelic’s headphones are priced at INR 25,000. For a price-sensitive market like India, scaling at this price point may prove difficult. 

To address this, the startup aims to follow the playbook of smart ring company Ultrahuman, which generates the majority of its revenue from the US market. The product is expected to be priced around $400 in the US market after discounting. 

For context, 60% of Ultrahuman’s FY25 revenue came from the US, while India contributed just 3%. However, right now, Ultrahuman is embroiled in a patent dispute which has soured its own story. 

Since Sychedelic manufactures its headphones in India, it does not plan to ignore the domestic market. “Our biggest revenue will come from the US, but the Indian market is also important for us,” said Rustagi.

The startup aims to launch the brand in the US by December this year or January next year. It hopes to bring prices down over the next few years as economies of scale improve. 

Since launching its new product, Sychedelic has generated about INR 70 Lakh in revenue. The founders hope to become an INR 500 Cr business in the next five years, but this ambition is not easy to accomplish especially if its thesis holds true. 

Other manufacturers will not ignore the smart headphones space if Sychedelic can prove its mettle. But competition is the last thing on the minds of the founders currently — for now, the big focus is to ramp up sales and get more consumers using the headphones. And they would also be hoping that unlike Neuphony, the time is right for Sychedelic. 

Edited by Nikhil Subramaniam