BCBusiness
Paola Telfer, CEO and founder of Sens.AI Incorporated, is a winner in the Innovator category of the 2025 Women of the Year Awards
“Nobody is familiar with neurotech,” admits Paola Telfer, “and the people who are heard about it from sci-fi films—and they’re scared of it.” It’s common to feel apprehension, stress or even doom when contemplating brain- altering technology or artificial intelligence. But her Whistler-based company, Sens.AI, aims to demystify that… by using neurotech and AI.
Telfer has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of British Columbia and an MBA from Simon Fraser University. She started her professional career in microchip design, but from a passion perspective, the work didn’t quite compute. “I realized there were more exciting aspects of engineering when you applied them, and you brought business into it,” she says. Sens.AI, the startup she and CTO Corey Julihn founded in 2018, is a neurotechnology platform that combines a wearable headset and handheld controller with a gamified app designed to support mental wellness. “We’re trying to empower people to take an active role in training for mental resilience—really, we’re trying to unlock the whole human brain and mind,” says the founder.
It sounds a bit like the movie Limitless (sorry, we had to make one sci-fi reference), but Telfer insists that the technology—and the results—are very real. Users put on the headset and choose from “missions” to help with things like anxiety, focus or sleep. Then the tech uses neuro-feedback, heart-rate training and intervention strategies like transcranial photobiomodulation (near-infrared light that penetrates the skull and helps shift brain waves) and binaural beats (a different sound frequency playing in each ear) to both read and write electrical signals in the brain. For a user, it might look like taking a few breaths, clearing your mind and watching as fog fades away and music increases in volume. If you lose focus, the fog comes back and the music quiets.
Since the product came on the market in August 2023, Sens.AI has amassed almost 5,000 platform users. There’s a two-month free trial subscription, and Telfer proudly shares that 85 percent of customers opt in to the paid membership once their trial is up. While biohackers and longevity enthusiasts are particularly interested in this kind of tech, Telfer stresses that anyone can use it to improve their everyday brain function. “We made the data very practical, digestible and gamified,” she says. “[Users] aren’t just saying, ‘I feel smarter and sharper,’ they’re saying, ‘I’m showing up better for my kids, I’m fighting less with my partner’—people are sharing stories of resilience.”
Discover our full list of 21 BCBusiness 2025 Women of the Year award winners here.