citybiz+ Catalio's neuroscience startup Flourish emerges with funding from Bezos, Google Ventures. June 5, 2026 George Petrocheilos Flourish, a neuroscience startup whose co-founders include Catalio Capital Management, has emerged from stealth with $500 million in funding from Jeff Bezos, Lux Capital and Google Ventures, among others, and a valuation of $2.5 billion, Wired has reported. New York-based Catalio co-founded the company and co-led the seed financing of Flourish, alongside a top-tier investor syndicate, Catalio co-founder George Petrocheilos said in an email. "The concept behind Flourish was derived from the U.S. intelligence community's flagship NeuroAI research program called MICrONS, which Catalio co-founder and managing partner, Dr. Jacob Vogelstein, conceived and led prior to launching Catalio," he added. Jacob's brother, Dr. Joshua Vogelstein, a Catalio venture partner, is also a co-founder of Flourish, having spent the last decade working at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning as a professor at Johns Hopkins. Flourish seeks to reinvent AI by putting real neurons under the microscope, and coming up with so-called "synthetic artificial intelligence," the Wired report said. "Flourish is a neuro AI company that is solving the two most difficult problems facing AI today: power efficiency and continuous learning. We are building Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain," Bezos was quoted as saying. Thomas Reardon IV, a neuroscientist and a Flourish co-founder, says the startup's goal is to build "a synthetic artificial intelligence brain that runs on 50 watts or less." For comparisons, Wired said, a person uses about 20 watts of energy to process information, while a single chip in an AI training cluster uses more than 30 times that amount and the "hyperscalers require thousands of chips and gigawatts of energy, enough to power small cities." According to Reardon, synthetic AI "should adapt to its conditions, be as nimble as a human mind, and burn a tiny fraction of an LLM's compute power and energy. The proof of concept is thriving inside our skulls." "There's something fundamentally wrong with saying, 'I need to basically read every book ever written 20 times over in order to learn English,'" Reardon reportedly said. "A human baby does it with a couple hundred thousand utterances." Reardon and Williams don't really know how to build systems that match the magic of a human brain, Wired said. But "what they have is a belief that an expert, well-resourced team - of AI researchers and neuroscientists working essentially side by side - can find the answer," it added. "Fundamentally, the company is looking for the algorithms underlying intelligence," says Jacob Vogelstein, Catalio Capital's managing partner. Catalio was founded by Petrocheilos, a Greek whizkid and Johns Hopkins alum, and Dr. R. Jacob Vogelstein, a biomedical engineer from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Petrocheilos came from Greece to study engineering at Johns Hopkins in 2009, before switching to financial economics. He spent a couple of years at Camden Partners - a private equity firm spun out of T. Rowe Price - where he joined hands with colleague Vogelstein to start a life sciences unit. Later, the two started Catalio. In 2023, KKR bought a minority stake in Catalio for an undisclosed amount.