Three SyNAPSE researchers, Dr. Heather Ames, Research Assistant Professor Anatoli Gorchetchnikov and Dr. Massimiliano Versace, the Director of Science and Technology Outreach of the CNS Technology Lab, are founders of the startup company Neurala. 
The Neurala Technology Platform (NTP) enables programmers to exploit emerging, low-cost parallel hardware components when implementing biologically inspired neural models. Neurala is currently applying brain-inspired machine vision and machine learning algorithms to the analysis of remote sensing data for land conservation and planning. The first application domain is watershed delineation in agriculture via analysis of LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) and satellite data, and will be applied by land managers in the state of Iowa, the first state in the US to be fully mapped by LIDAR. The software will be able to automatically analyze terabytes of remote sensing data to identify critical features in the territory, such as terraces and areas of concentrated water flow, allowing more precise and faster decisions to be taken by land managers. Planned extensions of this first project include widening the use of the software to the entire United States and widening the scope of the software by including more features in the land to be automatically identified by the algorithm.