Founding Team

Before Inclusive Brains

The story of Inclusive Brains started a while ago with a little help from 7-time Formula 1 World Champion, the legendary Lewis Hamilton and key roles played by social entrepreneur Rodrigo Hübner Mendes, neurotech innovator Tan Le, Ed Tech entrepreneur Vikas Pota and the World Economic Forum.

In 2012, Tan Le and Olivier Oullier met for the first time in person in Puerto Vallarta (Mexico) at an event organized by the World Economic Forum for its community of Young Global Leaders (YGL) that Tan and Olivier belonged to. The two of them had been in touch since 2011 when Olivier joined the YGL community. In Mexico, Tan offered Olivier to join EMOTIV - the neurotech company she founded with Dr. Geoffrey McKellar - as a member of the advisory board. And that was the beginning of their friendship and Olivier’s involvement with EMOTIV.

Later that year, in Washington DC (USA), after a work session at the White House organized by the World Economic Forum, Olivier met another Young Global Leader, Rodrigo Hübner Mendes from Brazil. Rodrigo is a philanthropist and successful social entrepreneur. He founded and leads the Rodrigo Mendes Institute who helped millions of people with disabilities in Brazil have access to education and professional training. 

Rodrigo and Olivier share two passions, football and Formula 1, that helped break the ice when they met and started teasing each other over the long-standing rivalry between their respective countries of origin (Brazil and France) in these two sports. Back then, little did they know that Formula 1 will play a key role in their friendship and in their lives.

In March 2018, Dr. Vikas Pota - who was then Non-Executive Chairman of the Varkey Foundation - invited Rodrigo and Olivier to give a fireside chat at the Global Education and Skills Forum held in Dubai where the Global Teacher Prize (deemed the “Nobel Prize of Education”) is awarded each year.  At that time, Olivier was on teaching leave from academia and, after leading Global Strategy in Head and Healthcare Industries and sitting on the Exco of the World Economic Forum (where he devised and ran the biggest value-based healthcare public-private partnership to date), he had become in 2017 the President of EMOTIV, the global leader in portable brain-sensing technologies headquartered in California.

That year, on a racetrack in Brazil where he is originally from, Rodrigo used an off-the-shelf brain-computer interface developed and commercialized by EMOTIV, to become the first person ever to drive a real Formula 1 car solely with the power of his mind (video of the full story here). Mind-controlling a race car on a real race track was already unprecedented, a true world-premiere made possible by EMOTIV’s neurotech, sponsor TV Globo and a team of Brazilian engineers, but it was even more special to Rodrigo. It marked the end of a 27-year hiatus since the last time he was in the driver’s seat. 

On August 4, 1990, Rodrigo was about to drive his younger brother, Aldo, to a football game when suddenly, he heard a loud noise. Without realizing what had just happened, he was pulled out of his car and thrown on the concrete by two individuals who would eventually steal his car. But this is not your typical carjacking story. The noise Rodrigo heard was one of the cowards shooting him in the neck from behind the car. As he was lying on the ground, he stopped feeling his limbs and was struggling to breathe and to stay alive.This event left him paralyzed from the neck down. Needless to say it changed Rodrigo’s life forever. 

Rodrigo, now quadriplegic, mind-controlling a Formula 1 took the Internet by storm. Thanks to Prof. Gérard Saillant, MD, founder and former President of the Paris Brain Institute and former Chief Medical Officer of the International Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), some key players in Formula 1 including former Ferrari CEO and then President of the FIA Jean Todt and 2016 F1 World Champion Nico Rosberg supported us (see Todt praising Rodrigo here and Rosberg  here).

 In Dubai, Rodrigo and Olivier meet two days before their fireside chat to catch up and rehearse. As they browse through the program of the event, they discover that Lewis Hamilton, then 5-time Formula 1 World Champion, was going to be interviewed by Dr. Vikas Pota.

Dr. Pota kindly offered Rodrigo and Olivier front row seats for the interview and for Rodrigo to ask Hamilton the first question at the end of the session. As the Q&A session was about to start, Pota introduced Rodrigo and his mind-controlled Formula 1 performance. To everyone’s surprise Hamilton said he had heard about it and asked how this was even possible. Rodrigo then challenged Hamilton to a race (see our interaction with Hamilton  here). A total class act, Hamilton accepted only if it was a “mind-controlled car” against “mind-controlled car” race. Which, of course, was what Rodrigo and Olivier hoped for. Within days, the story of them challenging Hamilton to a mind-controlled race gained coverage all over the world after USA Today, Tech Radar and  Business insider published an article about it and the news was covered by legacy media in more than 70 countries. 

Later that day, Olivier randomly ended up taking an elevator with Hamilton. As Olivier thanked the champ for being such a good sport, Hamilton insisted the race would happen eventually, because he has a brother with cerebral palsy and the issue of disability and neurodegenerative diseases is dear to his heart. Long story short, for budget and insurance purposes, the mind-controlled race cannot happen as long as Hamilton is active in F1. Rodrigo and Olivier might very well be the only two people who can’t wait for Hamilton to retire and for Lewis to race Rodrigo.

Meeting Rodrigo in 2012 was truly life changing for Olivier. Not only did he meet someone who would become one of his closest friends, but it made him realize the good neurotechnologies can do for people with disabilities. Something Rodrigo reminded him over dinner the evening following their interaction with Lewis Hamilton. Being his usual selfless self, Rodrigo emphasized how bad he felt for the people who, unlike him, do not have a network of friends in tech to help him achieve his dreams. The two friends agreed that the neurotechnologies that empowered Rodrigo to mind-control the Formula 1 with his mind must be made available to the masses, to make sure that every person with a disability has equal access to it and, by extension to education and to work. The first seed of what would later become Inclusive Brains was planted.

This is when Paul Barbaste, who founded Inclusive Brains with Olivier Oullier enters the game. When the Hamilton challenge happened, Paul was studying political sciences and public policy in France during the day, and working as a cyber security and intelligence analyst at night. In his spare time, being self-taught in data science, he started to learn artificial intelligence thanks to online courses by IBM and the Harvard X. About a year after the story of Rodrigo and Olivier challenging Lewis Hamilton went viral, Paul read about it and saw the video. He worked extra shifts to buy himself an EMOTIV neuroheadset and started building his very own brain-computer interface in his student room. 

By 2020, Paul, on his own, had built two working prototypes. One was a mind-controlled Star Wars BB8 drone – quite a meta project given he mind-controlled a toy that belongs to the movie saga that introduced mind-control to the world. The second prototype was a mind-controlled VR game. Thanks to his working prototypes, Paul applied and got accepted to the prestigious joint Master Program on Tech & Entrepreneurship by Ecole Polytechnique and HEC in France. By then, he had become the aide of a French Parliament Member who was also an active member of the French government’s National Digital Council (Conseil national du numérique). Paul was in charge of conducting research and writing briefs on cyber security and artificial intelligence.

Paul reached out to Olivier on LinkedIn. At that time Olivier was still the President of EMOTIV and he was receiving dozens of requests weekly from students seeking free hardware and/or software from the company. Paul was no exception, he wanted to get an MN8, the first ever brain-sensing earbuds that EMOTIV developed and commercialized. After seeing videos of Olivier presenting MN8 at a Fortune Magazine event in China and of the partnership with tech giant SAP, Paul wrote to Olivier daily until he got a reply.

They eventually scheduled a call. Originally planned to last 15 minutes, it went on for hours. They bonded over their passion for neurotechnologies and brain-computer interfaces, but also their shared values on technology’s main goal being to serve and assist every human, starting with the underserved and people with special needs. At some point Olivier shared with Paul his conversation with Rodrigo about making brain-computer interfaces available for all people with disabilities and Paul mentioned he had had the same aspiration for a while.

Paul needed scientific then business mentorship for his end-of-study project and asked Olivier to give him a hand. They named this project Steephen X (a double tribute to Prof. Stephen Hawking and X-Men’s Prof. Charles Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X). As they got to know each other, Olivier got beyond impressed by Paul’s skills in artificial intelligence and his ability to learn and execute fast. 

In early 2021, Olivier left EMOTIV and went back to France to work with Paul. He was sure that his neuroscientific, AI and business experience coupled with Paul’s expertise in cyber security and AI would perfectly blend.  

Eventually (and unsurprisingly), Paul would later graduate top of his class with the highest grades for his project. Together, they started to collect many awards, including two by the Ecole Polytechnique Foundation.

Paul and Olivier self-funded their first brain-computer interface prototype and founded Inclusive Brains in February 2022. In June of the same year, as part of “Joconde Immersive” an exhibition and installation organized by the Louvre Museum and the Grand Palais Immersif, a person with disability who had never used a brain-computer interface before, created art with his mind thanks to Inclusive Brains’ combination of neurotechnologies and artificial intelligence. It was the very first live demonstration that Inclusive Brains’ AI solution to mind-control connected objects worked.  

Since then, Inclusive Brains has improved its mental commands and developed IB Labs, a platform that can acquire, process and classify multimodal neurophysiological signals (brainwaves, heartbeats, respiration, electrodermal response; and many more to come) thanks to Riemannian geometry, a set of proprietary AI algorithms that can transform biosignals into motionless, silent and touchless commands and a set of detections to measure cognitive load and stress from biosignals.