Over the past few years, there has been a steady influx of startups trying to treat issues like depression, period pain, PMS, anxiety, and insomnia by using wearables that apply electrical, magnetic, or ultrasonic signals to stimulate the brain.

San Francisco-based Mave Health is the latest of that fleet, and claims its $495, neuromodulation headset can improve attention and mood, regulate stress, and even measure mental health. The startup is positioning the wearable as a non-medical device so it won’t need clearance from agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to sell in the U.S.

Dhawal Jain, who started the company in 2023 with his college batch mates Jai Sharma (CMO) and Aman Kumar (CTO), said he realized the need for such a device after his flatmate’s fiancée committed suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

“In India, committing suicide is a crime, which meant there was police involved, and we had to speak to her psychologist. The answers we got from them made us question if any of it made sense. We started connecting with other psychologists and were getting the same answers,” Jain said.

The founders felt that there was no tangible way to measure progress in the mental health space. “For example, if you ask a psychologist how do you know if a person is making progress, their response to it is very standard, which is that it’s not about progress. It’s about process […] But for somebody with depression who is spending a lot of time in therapy, progress is important. So how do you know whether they’re making progress or not? And even these basic questions were not being answered.”

In an effort to solve that, the team started to learn more about neuroscience by talking to experts, and soon after realized that while there has been progress around neuromodulation in labs, consumers haven’t had the benefit of it.

The company then worked with medical device and mental health experts to conduct trials of the technology. But eventually it took a different route and positioned its headset as a lifestyle device. Jain said this approach would let Mave reach a wider audience.

The device and technology

Mave Health’s device employs transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive technique to administer low-intensity currents to the brain to fire up neurons. The technique is sometimes used in psychology, and is said to be safe. Side effects are mild and temporary, like itching or discomfort.

The headset delivers a low 1-2 mA current to stimulate the brain. The startup says customers can use the device, which weighs roughly 100 grams, anytime, and recommends daily sessions spanning 20 minutes for the first few weeks of usage.

The startup also provides an app that can measure long-term trends in mood, focus, and stress levels. It can also integrate with other health data and track measures like Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Jain said users start with a self-reported baseline assessment when they start, and complete follow-up assessments every two to four weeks, which helps Mave understand if the device is helping a user in the long term.

The company hasn’t performed any clinical trials or published any studies yet. However, Jain says it worked with more than 500 users in a private beta in 2024 and 2025, during which eight in 10 users reported a 60% increase in productivity. The startup noted that 75% of its private beta users also reported a reduction in stress from their baseline within two months of usage.

Mave Health said it has performed four observational studies across 200 participants that are under academic review with an aim to publish this year.

Dr. Himanshu Nirvan, a Delhi-based psychiatrist who worked with Mave Health as a consultant, said that tDCS-based devices are considered a proven way to address mental health-related issues. However, he noted that he hasn’t looked at the technology from a lifestyle lens.

The company says it ran a program in India with Dr. Nirvan to test the device and the technology.

“We did select a lot of patients, and it was essentially a good program in my opinion. Things like that are generally not very frequently and easily available even in the mental health management space,” Dr. Nirvan said. “I felt that for a lot of people, tDCS is actually quite a good modality, considering that it’s a very portable device. You can essentially charge it at home, take it anywhere you want, even while you’re traveling.”

Leigh Elkins Charvet, a clinical neuropsychologist and Professor of Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told TechCrunch over email that while tDCS is considered a safe and effective approach to neuromodulation, devices need to be designed well to align electrodes properly, and users need to have regular and consistent sessions.

“One challenge is that consumers may use the device without clinical screening or clear guidance about whether it is appropriate for their symptoms. Another is that it can be difficult for users to determine whether the device is actually helping if outcomes are not being measured in a structured way,” she said.

Charvet added that the use of tDCS for broad lifestyle enhancement in healthy individuals has not been studied widely. “So far, most of the strongest research has focused on clinical populations or structured cognitive training paradigms. We do not yet have clear guidance or strong evidence supporting the use of tDCS to improve performance in otherwise healthy individuals. A lifestyle use case may still emerge, but that will rely on clearly defining target outcomes and demonstrating that effects are measurable and reproducible,” she said.

The device is currently available for preorder, and the company is aiming to ship its first batch to customers in the U.S. and India in April 2026.

The company recently raised $2.1 million in a seed funding round led by Blume Ventures, with participation from individual investors who include Tesla Autopilot AI lead Dhaval Shroff. The startup has raised just under $3 million in funding to date.

The U.S. Department of Defense said on Tuesday evening that Anthropic poses an “unacceptable risk to national security,” marking the agency’s first rebuttal to the AI lab’s lawsuits challenging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision last month to label the company a supply-chain risk. As part of its complaints, Anthropic had requested the court temporarily block the DOD from enforcing its label.

The crux of the DOD’s argument, made in a 40-page filing in a California federal court, is the concern that Anthropic might “attempt to disable its technology or preemptively alter the behavior of its model” before or during “warfighting operations” if the company “feels that its corporate ‘red lines’ are being crossed.”

Anthropic last summer signed a $200 million contract with the Pentagon to deploy its technology within classified systems. In later negotiations over the terms of the contract, Anthropic said it did not want its AI systems to be used for mass surveillance of Americans, and that the technology wasn’t ready for use in targeting or firing decisions of lethal weapons. The Pentagon contested that a private company shouldn’t dictate how the military uses technology.

In response, an Anthropic spokesperson pointed to CEO Dario Amodei’s late February statement: “Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.”

Chris Mattei, a lawyer specializing in First Amendment issues and a former Justice Department attorney, told TechCrunch there has been no investigation to support the DOD’s concerns of Anthropic potentially disabling or altering its AI models during warfighting operations. Without that evidence, the department’s argument fails to adequately explain how Anthropic’s negotiating position rendered it an “adversary,” Mattei argued.

“The government is relying completely on conjectural, speculative imaginings to justify a very, very serious legal step they’ve taken against Anthropic,” Mattei said. He added the department failed to “articulate a credible or even comprehensible rationale for why Anthropic’s refusal to agree to an ‘all lawful use’ provision rendered it a supply chain risk as opposed to a vendor that DOD simply didn’t want to do business with.”

Many organizations have spoken out against the DOD’s treatment of Anthropic, arguing that the department could have just ended its contract. Several tech companies and employees — including from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft — as well as legal rights groups have filed amicus briefs in support of Anthropic. 

In its lawsuits, Anthropic accused the DOD of infringing on its First Amendment rights and punishing the company based on ideological grounds.  

“In many ways, the government’s nonsensical arguments are themselves the best evidence that the administration’s conduct was plainly a retaliatory punishment for Anthropic’s refusal to agree to the government’s terms, which, contrary to the government’s brief, is a form of protected expression,” Mattei told TechCrunch.

A hearing on Anthropic’s request for a preliminary injunction is set for next Tuesday.

An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that its decision to seek judicial review does not change its “longstanding commitment to harnessing AI to protect our national security,” but that it’s a “necessary step” to protect its business, customers, and partners.

This article has been updated to include information from Chris Mattei, a constitutional rights lawyer, and comments from Anthropic.

A group of hackers suspected of working at least in part for the Russian government targeted iPhone users in Ukraine with a new set of hacking tools designed to steal their personal data, as well as potentially steal cryptocurrency, according to cybersecurity researchers. 

Researchers at Google and security firms iVerify and Lookout analyzed new cyberattacks against Ukrainians which were launched by a group identified only as UNC6353. The researchers looked at compromised websites in a hacking campaign that, they say, is related to one uncovered earlier this month. This most recent campaign used a hacking toolkit the companies called Darksword.

The discovery of Darksword, which follows that of a similar hacking toolkit, suggests that advanced, stealthy, and powerful spyware for iPhones may not be as rare as previously thought. Even then, Darksword only targeted users in Ukraine, implying some restraint in what could have otherwise been a widescale hacking campaign targeting users worldwide.

In early March, Google revealed details of a sophisticated iPhone-hacking toolkit called Coruna. The search giant said that the tool was used first by a government customer of a surveillance tech vendor, then by Russian spies targeting Ukrainians, and finally Chinese cybercriminals looking to steal cryptocurrency. As TechCrunch later revealed, the hacking toolkit was originally developed at U.S. defense contractor L3Harris, in particular by its hacking and surveillance tech department Trenchant.

Coruna was originally designed for use by Western governments, in particular those part of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance, consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom, according to former L3Harris employees with knowledge of the company’s iPhone hacking tools.  

Now, researchers said they uncovered a related campaign using more recent hacking tools exploiting different vulnerabilities. 

The Darksword toolkit, according to the researchers, was built to steal personal information such as passwords; photos; WhatsApp, Telegram, and text messages; and browser history. Interestingly, Darksword was not designed for persistent surveillance, but rather to infect victims, steal information, and quickly disappear.

Darksword’s “dwell time on the device is likely in the range of minutes, depending on the amount of data it discovers and exfiltrates,” Lookout researchers wrote. 

For Rocky Cole, the co-founder of iVerify, the most likely explanation is that the hackers were interested in learning about the victims’ pattern of life, which didn’t require them to do constant surveillance, but rather a smash-and-grab operation. 

Darksword was also designed to steal cryptocurrency from popular wallet apps, something that is unusual for a suspected government hacking group. 

“This may indicate that this threat actor is financially motivated, or alternatively it may indicate that this (likely) Russian state-aligned activity has expanded into financial theft targeting mobile devices,” Lookout wrote in its report. 

But, Cole told TechCrunch, there is no evidence that the Russian hacking group actually cared about stealing crypto, only that the malware could have been used for that. 

The malware was professionally developed to be modular and to make it easy to add new functionality, something that shows it was professionally designed, according to Lookout. Cole said he believes it’s possible that the same person who sold Coruna to the Russian government hacking group also sold Darksword. 

In terms of who was behind Darksword, for Cole “all signs point to the Russian government,” while Lookout said it’s the same group that used Coruna against Ukrainians, also a suspected Russian government group. 

“UNC6353 is a well-funded and connected threat actor conducting attacks for financial gain and espionage in alignment with Russian intelligence requirements,” Justin Albrecht, principal security researcher at Lookout, told TechCrunch. “We believe that a case can be made that UNC6363 is potentially a Russian criminal proxy, given the dual goals of financial theft and intelligence collection.”

As for victims, Cole said that the malware was designed to infect anyone visiting certain Ukrainian websites, as long as they were visiting them from within Ukraine, so it wasn’t a particularly targeted campaign.