Ben Nashman

A Health Imaging article based on a CBC News report states that two Toronto teens, Ben Nashman and Sunrose Billing, both 17-year-old high school students, were the co-founders of the medical imaging company Synex Medical and wanted to deliver higher-quality images than a standard MRI through a non-invasive approach, and that the two learned about medical imaging through The Knowledge Society, a program that prepares 13- to 17-year-olds to be leaders in technology.⁠[1]

The article states that the device they envisioned was the size of a ring, would detect levels of glucose, cholesterol or drugs without penetrating the skin, and would help diagnose degenerative brain diseases; a typical MRI detects positively charged hydrogen ions in water and fat, while the pair’s patented method detects other ions in the body.⁠[1]

Health Imaging prints two statements by Ben Nashman: “The bare bones of it is we have a way of using nuclear magnetic resonance to eventually put a device on your body,” and “The main thing here that hasn’t been done before is that it’s noninvasive and it’s very small.”⁠[1]

Sources describe his role in the company’s founding differently: BetaKit wrote in 2020 that Synex was founded in 2017 and called him its CEO and co-founder; a Radical VenturesRadical VenturesRadical Ventures is an artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm founded by Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen shortly after the 2017 launch of the Vector Institute in Toronto. It invests from incubation and seed through growth and pre-IPO stages, and its portfolio includes companies such as Cohere, Waabi, and World Labs. In 2026, it co-led the investment in Discovery Loop, founded by Jeff Dean and others, and completed the first close of its late-stage Radical Breakouts Fund.Open the full entry article of November 2020 states that he founded Synex Medical in 2017; TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry’s 2024 article, the MaRS speaker biography and the portfolio page on Radical Ventures’ website all call him the founder and name no co-founder.⁠[2][3][4][5][6]

TechCrunch states that by 17 he had ordered materials online and put together a makeshift MRI in his bedroom, a machine he himself called “really crap,” while the MaRS speaker biography says he built his own magnetic resonance system from scratch at 18.⁠[4][5]

TechCrunch states that by 18 he had held an internship working on brain imaging at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and had enrolled at the University of Toronto for engineering science. The MaRS speaker biography says he studied Engineering Science at the University of Toronto and dropped out of school to build Synex.⁠[4][5]

TechCrunch’s 2024 profile recounts that in 2019, at 18, he spent a night detained by U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry customs while transporting materials for his homemade MRI from Buffalo to Toronto: customs took issue with the label on the package, “nuclear magnetic resonance.” He spent hours in a bright waiting room, thought he might have landed on a list of suspicious individuals, and eventually convinced the officers that he was just a run-of-the-mill 18-year-old scientist with an obsession with MRI technology; they let him take his magnet, which weighed roughly 80 pounds. By his own account he got back at around 3 or 4 a.m. and had a few hours of sleep before classes. The article says he insists it was worth it.⁠[4]

The same article states that he met Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry in 2019 and pitched his vision first to Sam Altman and later to Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry.⁠[4]

On October 22, 2019, Canada’s Global News posted a video of 2 minutes 34 seconds in its “Tech in T.O. Next Generation” series whose title says the teenager was developing non-invasive blood testing technology; the video description states that Ben Nashman was still a teenager but was already developing non-invasive blood testing, work that could change the lives of millions of people in the future.⁠[7]

The same day Global News also posted an extended interview of 3 minutes 7 seconds; its description states that Ben Nashman explains in it how he plans to develop non-invasive blood testing technology.⁠[8]

Erica Vella of Global News published a companion article on October 23, 2019, the eighth instalment of a ten-part series titled “Tech in T.O. Next Generation,” which gives his age as 19. In it he said he had been interested in tech and science since he was a little kid and that The Knowledge Society had bridged those interests; there he learned about emerging fields such as quantum computing and nanotechnology, and he then studied biotechnology on his own, which led to the work he was doing. The article states that he was then working with Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto; he said he did most of his testing there and was developing the technology with help from colleagues at the hospital, and he described it as a way to monitor metabolites in the blood without needles or finger pricks. He said his goal was to give people more data about their bodies and that constantly monitoring key molecules in the blood could improve the understanding of health and help predict outcomes for diseases such as diabetes and cancer.⁠[9]

BetaKit wrote on October 29, 2020, that Synex Medical, a Toronto-based healthtech startup, had raised a seed round of CAD $6.99 million (USD $5.25 million) led by Accomplice, a Boston-based seed venture capital firm, with participation from its earlier investor Radical Ventures and the angel investor Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry; the capital was to be used to grow the team and expand to the United States. The article describes the company as making a wearable that measures blood metabolites, with technology based on magnetic resonance, the principle behind MRI, that aims to measure glucose, lactate and ketones non-invasively and accurately and to show in real time the levels of metabolites linked to weight gain, athletic performance and the likelihood of developing diabetes. The article counts Synex among several Canadian biotech startups seeking to use predictive analytics to reduce healthcare costs and names Deep Genomics as another example.⁠[2]

In the article he said the company was expanding its operations to Boston to take advantage of the talent and research there, and that COVID-19 had shown the team could make progress without being in the same room. He said he eats, drinks, sleeps and exercises without knowing what is happening inside his body and compared this to driving without instruments; the Radical Ventures article prints the phrase as “driving a car without a speedometer or a fuel gauge.”⁠[2][3]

Jeff Fagnan, founder and general partner of Accomplice, said in the BetaKit article that giving people a painless, easy and data-rich way to understand their bodies is an amazing vision and that Ben Nashman’s team has a chance to contribute meaningfully to society’s health.⁠[2]

Parasvil Patel of Radical Ventures wrote on November 9, 2020, that Radical Ventures had announced the previous week its investment in Synex’s seed round alongside Accomplice and had earlier invested in the company’s founding investment round; the article draws a comparison with the Tricorder, the handheld diagnostic device of Star TrekStar TrekStar Trek is a science-fiction franchise originating in the work of Gene Roddenberry. Its central subjects include exploration aboard starships, encounters across cultures and humanity’s future. It spans television, film, animation and other media, with a long-established fan community.Open the full entry, and says Synex combines machine learning with novel magnetic resonance technology. The portfolio page on Radical Ventures’ website gives 2020 as the year of its investment in Synex.⁠[3][6]

An undated TKS speaker page calls him a TKS alumnus and the founder of Synex Medical, a medical device company, and says the company had raised $7 million from investors including Naval Ravikant, Sam Altman and Radical Ventures and that he was developing a ring able to detect blood metabolites such as glucose non-invasively. An undated project page on the Mitacs website states that SYNEX Medical, a Toronto-based biotechnology startup, had developed a non-invasive wearable ring that uses nuclear magnetic resonance to track biomarker concentrations in blood, and that a University of Alberta research project was studying additive manufacturing of polymer-bonded or sintered permanent magnets, which were to form an array generating a uniform magnetic field for the device.⁠[10][11]

On January 6, 2022, the Thiel Foundation announced a new class of 23 Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry recipients that included Ben Nashman. The announcement gives his age as 21 and his location as Toronto, Ontario, and describes his project, Synex Medical, as building the next generation of non-invasive health monitoring technology, beginning with the world’s first non-invasive glucose monitor.⁠[12]

The announcement states that the program, launched in 2011, runs for two years and gives each fellow $100,000, and that its only requirement is that fellows pause their college enrollment.⁠[12]

TechCrunch’s 2024 article gives 2021 as the year he landed the fellowship. The MaRS speaker biography mentions the fellowship directly after stating that he dropped out of school to build Synex.⁠[4][5]

On November 10, 2023, Synex Medical published a post on its Substack announcing that it had directly measured the signal of the glucose molecule itself non-invasively using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), as opposed to a quantity correlated with glucose. The post explains that conventional MRS needs very strong fields and room-sized equipment and that the company’s hypothesis was that weak magnetic fields could shrink the system by many orders of magnitude; the device is a small tabletop unit with a low-field magnet into which the user inserts a finger, the measurement is taken at the fingertip, only a magnetic field and low-frequency radio waves are used, and the total power deposited is far less than that of a smartphone.⁠[13]

The post states that the glucose signal was reproduced across different people and was unaffected by skin color; that in a preliminary regression against a finger-prick reference device the R² was 0.95; and that the analysis used no machine learning, training dataset or per-patient calibration. It says three independent magnetic resonance experts reviewed the results and prints comments from two of them: Matt Rosen, director of low-field MRI at HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and Mass General Hospital, and Andre Simpson, director of environmental NMR spectroscopy at the University of Toronto. The company wrote that lactate, ketones and amino acids could later be measured with the same hardware.⁠[13]

Engadget covered the result on November 15, 2023, describing Synex Medical as a Toronto-based biotech research firm backed by Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry. The article calls Ben Nashman the founder and CEO of Synex; he said the company would eventually like to build a wearable and that further miniaturization was needed before a commercial product. Andre Simpson of the University of Toronto said he had reviewed Synex’s white paper and seen the instrument work, and called the device the “real deal”; Matthew Rosen, a Harvard physicist, called the device “clever” and “a great idea,” said “I never thought people could do glucose with a benchtop machine,” and left the question of whether it is good enough for clinical use to clinicians. Engadget updated the story on November 16 to make clear that the company comment came from Synex’s CEO and not from a company representative.⁠[14]

The MaRS speaker biography states that Synex has shown, for the first time in history, that it can directly measure glucose completely non-invasively.⁠[5]

On September 22, 2024, Synex Medical announced a $21.8 million Series A financing, which it described as oversubscribed. Returning investors included Accomplice, Radical Ventures and Naval Ravikant, and new investors included Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, Fundomo and Aravind Srinivas. The company wrote that the funds would speed up the productization and clinical validation of its first product, a non-invasive glucose monitor to replace finger pricking, and that the same measurement approach can reach other metabolites such as lactate, triglycerides and amino acids. The announcement does not mention Ben Nashman by name.⁠[15]

The announcement carries two endorsements: John L. Smith, former chief scientific officer of Johnson & JohnsonJohnson & JohnsonJohnson & Johnson is an American healthcare company founded in 1886, headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker JNJ.Open the full entry’s LifeScan division and author of The Pursuit of Noninvasive Glucose, wrote that magnetic resonance glucose measurement is, compared with many other techniques, “relatively underexplored” and deserving of further effort, and Alex Morgan of Khosla Ventures called a direct, non-invasive measurement of glucose and other metabolites “groundbreaking.”⁠[15]

The law firm Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP states on its representative-work page that it advised Synex Medical on the $21.8 million Series A financing, announced on September 22, 2024, through a team from its Emerging and High Growth Companies group, with Toronto as the lead office.⁠[16]

TechCrunch published a profile of him the same day, giving his age as 24, naming Accomplice, Radical Ventures, Fundomo and Khosla Ventures among the Series A investors, and stating that the round brought the company’s total funding to more than $36 million, including seed funding from Sam Altman.⁠[4]

The article states that the prototype was then about the size of a toaster and that he hoped to shrink it to fit in the palm of a hand; the device first uses MRI to create a three-dimensional image of a finger and find the best spot for testing, then uses magnetic resonance spectroscopy, sending radio pulses that excite molecules and filtering the resulting signals for the target molecule. The company planned to start with glucose and later measure amino acids, lactate and ketones.⁠[4]

Jun Jeon, an investor at Khosla Ventures focusing on healthcare, called the effort “an absolute moonshot” in the article; the article notes that he had yet to try the prototype, but he said that if Ben Nashman can deliver on his promises, “this was a bet worth taking.” The article notes that Synex must still complete rigorous clinical trials to show the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that its machine can accurately isolate glucose, and that the device’s portability remained unproven; Jun Jeon added that healthcare lacks the infrastructure and reimbursement to make such technology broadly accessible.⁠[4]

The article also notes other efforts in the field: Know Labs and the Berlin-based DiaMonTech are each making their own non-invasive products, AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry is said to have been working quietly on a non-invasive glucose monitor, and Google once tried to make a glucose-monitoring contact lens before pausing the project in 2018. A woman based in MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry who has had Type 2 diabetes for years, interviewed for the article, said that no longer having to prick her fingers would be a “godsend,” but that a device that is not portable would do no good outside the house.⁠[4]

At the end of the article Ben Nashman said he wants to understand what his own body and his parents’ bodies need; in his words, “A technology like this is just needed to usher in that age of predictive medicine.”⁠[4]

The Official Gazette of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for March 11, 2025, lists Benjamin Saul Nashman, Stephen McFadyen and Martin Gajdosik, all of Toronto, Canada, as the inventors of U.S. Patent No. 12,245,849 B2, “System and method for nuclear magnetic resonance measurement of blood analyte levels,” assigned to Synex Medical Inc. of Toronto. The application (No. 18/798,176) was filed on August 8, 2024, claims priority to four provisional applications filed between August 8 and October 18, 2023, was published on February 13, 2025, as US 2025/0049343 A1, and has 9 claims; the gazette lists A61B 5/055 first among its CPC classifications, and the claim 1 it prints describes a nuclear magnetic resonance system with a set of magnets producing a magnetic field over a region of interest within a bore.⁠[17]

As of November 2026, the portfolio page on Radical Ventures’ website lists him as Founder & CEO of Synex and sums up the company’s business as “At-home blood testing via magnetic resonance.”⁠[6]

An undated MaRS speaker biography calls him the founder and CEO of Synex Medical, says the company’s technology is based on ultra-miniaturized magnetic resonance and that he founded it with the mission of giving people access to their metabolism so as to make predictive healthcare a reality and extend lives, and states that as CEO he oversees major technical development in NMR physics, hardware and signal processing, as well as overall company strategy.⁠[5]

The University of Toronto Entrepreneurship startup job board carries an undated company page for Synex Medical that gives 2017 as its founding year, Series A as its stage, 51–200 employees as its size, and Toronto and North York, Toronto, as its locations. A posting on the same board for a Principal MRS Scientist, no longer accepting applications, lists Ben Nashman as the hiring manager with the title Chief Executive Officer refers to the company’s offices in Toronto and Boston, and describes Synex as a hybrid organization with in-office, fully remote and blended roles.⁠[18][19]

TechCrunch’s profile recounts his recollection that at about 16 he went to his veterinarian’s office with printed-out scientific studies, having decided that his dog should be put on the immunosuppressive drug rapamycin, which the article describes as controversially heralded by longevity enthusiasts. He recalled the vet declining with the words “this is just way too experimental for me.” He added, “Later, I got my parents on it and I got on it.”⁠[4]

The article calls this the first of several longevity self-experiments and states that he went on to take the diabetes drug acarbose briefly, to pay thousands for a Prenuvo full-body scan and to get hold of a continuous glucose monitor.⁠[4]

The article states that his interest in health combined with a fascination with the physics of MRI, and that he believed MRI could give him more information about his body than an Oura Ring or Whoop. He said, “I’ve probably scanned my finger honestly thousands of times at this point,” and “I think I have the record for most MRIs ever, probably.”⁠[4]

Synex Medical: Official website: https://www.synexmedical.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6][15]

Synex Medical’s Substack: https://synex.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]