Highland Instruments Highland Instruments

Highland Instruments operates at the intersection of medical devices, neuromodulation, clinical research, and digital health. Its primary differentiation is ESStim™, which combines transcranial ultrasound with transcranial direct current stimulation to focus, amplify, and steer applied currents noninvasively. The company also links stimulation research with IMAS, an assessment platform using multimodal sensing, wearables, machine learning, and clinical evaluations. This combination gives Highland a broader technical scope than a device company focused solely on stimulation hardware, while its stated clinical work spans chronic pain, movement disorders, neurodegenerative conditions, and psychiatric indications. Highland has disclosed randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies and a broad intellectual-property portfolio covering neuromodulation, artificial intelligence, imaging, wearable sensors, and movement kinematics. Relative to larger, better-capitalized medical-device developers, Highland remains a small private company with approximately one to ten employees and $5.05 million in disclosed funding. Its $4 million NIH grant provides meaningful non-dilutive support, but commercialization and regulatory milestones are not yet documented.

Highland Instruments’ trajectory shows a transition from early-stage development toward clinical validation and commercialization. The company’s disclosed funding begins with a $750,000 seed round on Feb 24, 2021. It then added a $100,000 MassVentures grant on May 16, 2025, a $4 million NIH grant on Nov 10, 2025, and a further $200,000 grant from the Executive Office of Economic Development and MassVentures on Aug 24, 2026. Together, these events bring disclosed funding to $5.05 million, with grants accounting for most of the capital. Product development has broadened beyond the ESStim™ stimulation system: the IMAS announcement on Jan 8, 2025 described an AI-enabled suite integrating sensors, wearables, machine learning, and clinical assessments. Research announcements in August and September 2025 added evidence of activity in stroke recovery prediction and Parkinson’s disease studies. The August 2026 START II award is the clearest recent inflection point because it explicitly supports movement toward commercialization.