Founder and co-CEO Adrian Brodesser says the company did not start with eye-tracking at all. "We started quite exploratory, with the goal of understanding how we can measure cognitive states outside the lab," he told The International. "The first iterations focused on VR, because interactions in digital environments are easy to analyze. We quickly realized eye-tracking had the potential to become the right sensor for our goals."

The new capital is earmarked for three things in 2026: expanding the existing B2B business, funding longitudinal studies that track cognitive health and human performance over time, and pushing the technology into the consumer market. The B2C move is the bigger bet. Somareality wants to put cognitive measurement in the hands of people who, as Brodesser puts it, have always wanted to understand how their minds work but could only do it inside a lab.

For a company with global ambitions, staying in Vienna might look like a constraint. Brodesser sees it the other way. "I was born in Vienna and love it here," he says. "Vienna has an amazing grant landscape. Especially for deep-tech companies, I could not imagine a better place (maybe Switzerland). What Vienna is missing in venture capital, it makes up for in grant funding." The clearest proof, he adds, is on the org chart: "We are now at a position where we have people from the US moving to Vienna to join us."

Alin Stanciu, the partner who led the deal at Catalyst Romania, publicly explained his interest. "Most [companies] are trying to make something faster, cheaper, or more efficient," he wrote on LinkedIn. "Every now and then, one comes along trying to understand something much more complicated: the human mind." He pointed to the customer list as the reason the science already feels practical rather than speculative. "Investing in a company that helps people understand how their brains work is particularly appealing in a world where most of us switch between 100 tasks before lunch."