“We realised that video games could change the lives of people with mild cognitive impairment and significantly improve their daily lives.”
Jakob Futorjanski and Rojahn Ahmadi
“We both come from very different worlds.”
We have very different professional experiences. I come from the information sciences and finance world, whereas Rojahn comes from the world of artificial intelligence and gaming. We didn’t have jobs that made a concrete impact on society, and over the years, we realized we could do more for the world. This was a turning point for me.
I asked myself: “What difference does it make to try to improve a bank’s performance by one basis point through algorithmic optimization?” If my work doesn’t make a difference for our community, what’s the point? So I decided to change direction.
One thing led to another, we found ourselves working with an experimental psychologist on a study of the use of brain training “games” to improve the cognitive functions of people
with acquired or neurodegenerative disabilities. The problem was that traditional, analogue cognitive exercises didn’t have the “stickiness factor” to motivate people to use them regularly. So we tried to solve this problem by using fun exercises.
What if the solution came from video games?
Studies on the impact of video games on cognitive abilities seemed to confirm our intuition: people who used NeuroNation training performed 20% better than people who did not use it. Our initial idea was therefore validated, but we still had to find a way to make it accessible to the general public. So in 2011, we launched NeuroNation, a web platform for cognitive training games. NeuroNation is a personalized cognitive training app available on all app stores and on our website. At first, the company struggled to find a viable business model. We tried advertising, one-time payments and virtual currency, but nothing worked. In 2013, the company adopted a freemium subscription model. Users can download the app for free, but must pay a monthly subscription to unlock all games. This model allowed the company to stabilize financially.
Our initial objective has always been to have our application recognized as a medical product, which would allow it to be reimbursed by health insurance funds and therefore accessible free of charge to all patients.
We just needed for everything to start gelling together. In 2014, we began to invest in the personal development market, in particular by offering the application to employers using a B2B channel. This allowed us to increase our user base and revenue. Shortly thereafter, a scientific study was published in Germany, confirming the effectiveness of NeuroNation in improving cognitive abilities. This study marked a key step for us—launching NeuroNation as a medical product. Today, the freemium version of NeuroNation has twenty-seven million users in more than one hundred and fifty countries.
In 2023, we managed to obtain recognition from the German Ministry of Health; our medical product can be prescribed by doctors and reimbursed by all health insurances in Germany and more than three thousand healthcare professionals already prescribe the digital health application.
A three-fold positive impact for patients.
Impact Partners provided us with strategic support in our development. They introduced us to the director of innovation at the Brain Institute, with whom we are in active discussions to continue developing our solution, as well as to key people in Europe, particularly within social security systems. Thanks to these contacts, we were able to move forward with our objective of requesting reimbursement of our services from social security organizations. On a strategic level, they helped us think about our priorities and identify the best growth opportunities. Finally, Impact Partners is the only investment fund that asks us to measure the impact of our solution on users and patients. So we have a key performance indicator (KPI) that measures the number of lives improved each month and reminds us why we took so much risk and why we work.
For Impact Partners, social performance is as important as financial performance.
If we had no impact, we would have no market. With NeuroNation, we focus on a specific niche—that of prevention of cognitive decline. But we would encourage people to get involved in whatever economically and socially beneficial niche is of interest to them—there are many other impact niches! In the future, we are interested in looking into the fight against the psychological dimensions of aging.
The countries of the European Union must adapt to take full advantage of the potential of new neuroscientific technologies.
The European population is aging and needs solutions to improve and maintain its populations’ cognitive abilities. However, there is a certain reluctance to use digital technologies, particularly in countries where these tools are less known. In the European Union, health is a field that is still under-digitalised, with large disparities between countries. Europeans still have much to learn about the benefits of new neuroscience technologies. To move into different markets in different cultures and different countries, NeuroNation also had to adapt. We made modifications to the visuals, the overall interface and the business model. It is important to understand that the way apps are used varies from culture to culture.
