For the 145 million Americans living with a neurological condition, the path to care is often long, confusing, and fragmented. With only 21,000 neurologists nationwide, patients typically wait four to six months for an appointment. Once they finally sit down with a specialist, the system isn’t built to deliver the quality, personalized care they need.
That’s the problem Liz Burstein set out to solve when she founded Neura Health in 2020.
After navigating her own multi-year battle with chronic nerve pain, Liz saw firsthand how broken the patient experience is. With Neura, she’s building the experience she wishes she had as a patient: a platform that makes neurological care more accessible, personalized, and connected—giving both patients and providers the tools to understand conditions in real time and deliver better outcomes.
Pear first backed Liz and Neura Health in 2021. Today, the company has served more than 43,000 patients nationwide, combining virtual visits with top neurologists and a modern patient app that brings together symptom tracking, pain diaries, and medication histories. Together, these tools are helping clinicians deliver faster, smarter, and more individualized care.
Here’s a closer look at Liz’s journey so far and what’s ahead for her and Neura Health following their recent Series A announcement.
From patient journey to founder journey
Early in the pandemic, Liz developed a deeply trapped nerve that caused chronic pain for more than two years. Despite being in New York City—a hub for world-class specialists—Liz had to wait six months to see a neurologist. When the appointment finally came, she was handed a paper intake form and spent the first twenty minutes of the visit regurgitating answers to questions she already had detailed responses to in her symptom diary on her phone’s Google Sheets app.
“I had this robust pain diary on my phone where I had literally tracked every day’s pain level, what medications I had tried, what exercise I had done, and what my diet was like,” Liz says. “Sometimes I would bring in a spreadsheet and [the specialists] would kind of look at me like I’m crazy. What am I supposed to do with all this data?”
That experience led to a key insight. The bottleneck in neurological care wasn’t just about access. There was also a data disconnect. Liz realized there had to be a better way to bring specialists up to speed on patient history and progress.
So Liz teamed up with Sameer Madan, a former Meta engineer, and together they began exploring how technology could close that gap.
Building Neura from the ground up
Before writing a line of code, Liz and Sameer spoke to 50 neurologists and dozens of patients living with chronic conditions. They wanted to understand the frustrations, delays, and missed connections that made neurology one of the most underserved areas in medicine.
Those early conversations helped them validate their hypothesis: that integrating patient-reported data with modern care delivery could transform both access and outcomes.“We came at it from a first-principles perspective before we even started to raise and build the product,” says Liz.
As they began building, another challenge surfaced. The digital health landscape was booming with new tools from modern, API-first electronic health records to automated billing platforms and modular care plans. “There was this overwhelm of vendors, and [this question] of what do we build versus buy,” Liz says.
To answer that question, Liz and Sameer spent a lot of time in the early days whiteboarding to identify what would be proprietary to Neura Health.
“Ultimately, it was the data set we’re aggregating—neurological symptoms, treatments, and outcomes—as well as the patient app that keeps people engaged and really drives delight,” says Liz.
Fundraising with purpose
From the beginning, Liz approached fundraising with the same intentionality she brought to building Neura. Each round reflected where the company was in its journey and what kind of partner it needed next.
At the pre-seed stage, she and Sameer were looking for more than capital. They wanted investors who would be hands-on, bring operational expertise, and stay deeply engaged as Neura grew.
That’s what made Pear the right fit. Despite an oversubscribed round, Liz chose Pear to lead Neura’s pre-seed because of its strong reputation for rolling up its sleeves and helping founders navigate early stage technical and go-to-market challenges.
Pear was such an obvious winner. Even to this day, Pear really stands out for how proactive they are. They’re one of the few top funds that actually deliver on the promise to help and get involved.
As Neura gained traction, Liz shifted her focus toward strategic investors who could open new doors. The company’s seed round, led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, helped Neura expand beyond direct-to-consumer into enterprise partnerships with employers and health systems.
“Koch is one of the largest private companies in the world,” Liz explains. “We were looking for a way to get Neura into the hands of their thousands of employees—and we’ve now done that.”
Liz again sought a strategic partner when it came to raising a Series A, recently announcing an $11.4M round led by the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women Venture Fund—the fund’s first-ever investment. The round brought Neura’s total funding to $22 million and included Pear and KDT alongside new investors, Norwest Ventures, Esplanade Ventures, Correlation Ventures, and E12 Ventures.
What’s next for Neura Health
With its Series A complete, Neura is entering its next phase of growth.
The company’s focus centers on three priorities: national expansion, building out its commercial team, and growing partnerships with clinics, hospitals, and pharma companies. “We have a small commercial team that needs to scale to deliver on the third priority, which is to grow with large enterprises,” says Liz.
At the same time, Liz and team are exploring how AI can make neurologists more efficient with their time.
We’re building at a time where healthcare is transforming rapidly because of AI. We’re very excited about leveraging AI tools, and we’re thinking very critically about what components of our stack can be made better and more efficient with AI.
For Neura Health, this means automating workflows, surfacing insights from patient data, and freeing clinicians to spend more time where it matters most: with patients.