When a technically impressive, well‑funded startup collapses, the default explanation is often superficial: “not enough sales”, “wrong timing”, or “tough market”. Alphabeats, the Eindhoven‑based neurofeedback venture that aimed to help athletes and other high‑performers reach a mental “flow state” by combining EEG signals with music, deserves a more complete diagnosis.

Alphabeats had a working product, external validation, and serious backing. The company raised around €1.5M from a tech fund backed by ASML and Philips, won a Gerard & Anton award, appeared multiple times at CES in Las Vegas, and launched collaborations, including a neurofeedback pilot with Garmin and professional sports clubs. Yet by December 2025, Alphabeats Works B.V. had been declared bankrupt by the Oost‑Brabant court, with roughly 300 paying customers and a debt load below €200,000 after heavy cost-cutting and staff layoffs.​

This article reconstructs what likely happened using Growth Lantern’s growth lens: a structured way of looking at innovation journeys through major inflection points and a set of underlying drivers that shape a venture’s trajectory. The goal is not to criticise Alphabeats in hindsight, but to extract lessons that can help other founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders design stronger growth paths.

1. Where was Alphabeats on its growth path?

A helpful starting point is to ask: where was Alphabeats on its journey from idea to mainstream adoption when things broke down?

Public information shows that Alphabeats had:

• A functioning mobile app on iOS and Android that combined a user’s own music with EEG‑based neurofeedback to guide brain activity into a more relaxed or focused state.​

• Validated technology originating from Philips, wrapped into a startup vehicle and iterated in collaboration with HighTechXL and LUMO Labs.​

• Real‑world pilots with professional sports clubs and Brabant top athletes, sometimes in combination with Garmin devices.​

• Paying customers – ultimately around 300 – on recurring subscriptions.​

This places Alphabeats beyond the “does the tech work?” and “will anyone try it?” stages. The venture had passed the initial inflection point and had a working prototype with early users.

The decisive question is: had Alphabeats turned that early product into a strong, commercially sustainable proposition with a repeatable business model and the beginnings of scale?

The answer, based on the bankruptcy filings and curator statements, appears to be No:

• Growth remained limited, with only about 300 paying customers. That number was “insufficient to cover operating costs”, according to the court‑appointed curator.​

• The business was structurally dependent on third‑party suppliers for EEG headbands, making the cost structure and delivery model fragile at low volumes.​

• A hoped‑for collaboration with Apple – embedding Alphabeats’ functionality or sensors in AirPods – never materialised, depriving the company of the distribution and scale it had counted on.​

In other words, Alphabeats cleared a major obstacle by having a working product and early adopters, but never consolidated the second: transforming that product into a commercially sustainable, scalable business model.

2. A 360° view: what drove the breakdown?

Growth Lantern’s framework looks at a set of interlocking drivers. For each, the question is the same: given Alphabeats’ maturity, was this area strong enough to carry the next phase of growth, or did it become a bottleneck?

Below is a synthesis across the key dimensions, followed by a more detailed discussion.

• Market focus and growth bets. Alphabeats tried to speak to elite athletes, high‑performing professionals, and eventually US consumers, while also holding out for a platform‑level opportunity with Apple. That created ambition but diluted focus. When it needed a clearly defined, economically tight early market, it was spread across several.

• Product package and customer promise. The core idea, using your own music and subtle audio changes to improve mental performance, was compelling and differentiating. But the way it was packaged (app, headband, and emerging service elements) never crystallised into a clearly standardised, end‑to‑end solution for a well‑defined customer group.

• Sales engine and market access. Alphabeats had high visibility, sometimes literally through repeated presence at CES, but visibility is not the same as a repeatable sales and distribution system. The company leaned heavily on the expectation of an Apple breakthrough rather than building deep channels to specific segments in Europe first.

• Operating and delivery model. Dependency on third‑party headbands meant each new customer required hardware procurement, integration, logistics, and support. With only a few hundred paying customers, the economics of this set‑up remained unfavourable, even after cost‑cutting.

• Rights and geography. In Europe, the underlying technology could be used freely; in the US, licences were required. That asymmetry matters when the United States is seen as the “ultimate growth market”, as it adds complexity and cost where the company hoped to scale.

• Funding and runway. The company raised meaningful capital (≈€1.5M), but at its stage, that capital needed to buy time for multiple iterations of the business model and route‑to‑market. Instead, much of the narrative and energy was anchored on one big partnership outcome. When that did not happen, there was little room left to redesign the business around what had been learned from the 300 paying customers.

Taken together, these aspects reveal not a singular fatal error, but a recurring pattern: a company with validated technology and enthusiastic early adopters, yet unable to systematically redesign its proposition, business model, and operating model so that its metrics were viable at the current scale. This challenge is not unique to Alphabeats; for example, the collapse of Doppler Labs, a startup that also developed cutting-edge audio wearable technology and garnered significant user interest, was attributed in part to a similar inability to transition from innovative prototype to a sustainable, scalable business before anticipated strategic partnerships materialised. Such comparative cases further illustrate that robust business model re‑engineering must precede dependency on large platform deals for deep-tech ventures seeking sustainable growth.

3. How our framework would read Alphabeats’ maturity

At Growth Lantern, the starting point for any engagement is a structured maturity assessment:

• How far along is the proposition in real terms – not just technically, but in terms of customers, revenue, and repeatability?

• Given that maturity, which parts of the growth engine matter most right now?

• Where is there already strength, and where are the weakest links that will break under the burden of the next growth phase?

Applied to Alphabeats, the picture might look like this:

1. Concept and early product – high maturity.

   • Working neurofeedback product, credible pilots, straightforward problem/benefit narrative for athletes and high‑performing individuals.​

2. Transition to sustainable offering – incomplete.

   • Some early customers, but not enough to fund the venture.

   • Hardware‑dependent delivery, high overhead relative to revenue, and unfavourable unit economics.

   • Business model and market access are still heavily contingent on a significant platform deal that never closed.​

3. Scale – not yet reached.

   • No evidence of broad adoption in any segment or market.

   • No robust, replicated growth pattern visible from outside.

From this perspective, Alphabeats was attempting to step into a scale‑up phase while several core elements of a “sustainable offering” were not yet stable.

4. What could have been done differently – and how Growth Lantern approaches these cases

There is no way to know exactly what internal trade‑offs were discussed at Alphabeats. However, using our framework, we can outline the types of interventions that tend to make a difference at this stage.

A venture in Alphabeats’ position typically benefits from:

• Sharper focus on a single early market. Choose one segment (for example, European professional clubs and clinics) where the offering demonstrably creates value, and design everything – product, service, pricing, sales, operations – around winning that segment first.

  
  

• Deliberate decoupling from “dream deals”. Significant platform cooperations can be powerful accelerators, but they should sit atop a business that already works. A scale‑up plan that only works if the dream partner signs is structurally fragile.

  
  

• Conscious redesign of the business model around real numbers requires scenario-based analysis of unit economics at different customer scales. For instance, with 300 paying users, the company might calculate the direct costs and revenues per customer, then identify at which point subscription fees offset the fixed and variable costs associated with hardware provision, licensing, and ongoing support. As a concrete example, Alphabeats could evaluate whether shifting from a bundled hardware model to a bring-your-own-device approach reduces per-customer acquisition and support costs, or whether introducing tiered pricing linked to service intensity improves margins as the user base scales from 300 to 1,000 or 3,000 customers. This kind of tangible modelling informs strategic decisions about hardware bundling, pricing levels, support intensity, and overall cost structure.

  
  

• Pragmatic operating model choices. If proprietary hardware is not feasible, supplier dependency needs to be balanced with minimum volumes, negotiated terms, and possibly alternative sensor technologies. If hardware remains vital, either the business model must bear that burden or the offering must be simplified.

This is precisely where Growth Lantern’s approach is built to add value.

Rather than looking at a venture only through the lens of technology or capital, we work with founders and boards to:

• Map the current position on the growth path with evidence, not optimism.

• Identify which underlying drivers are most critical at this stage, as they are not all equally important at all times.

• Co‑design a sequence of strategic, tactical, and operational moves that strengthen those drivers in the correct order: from market focus and growth bets, through sales engine, market access, and economics, into operating model and governance.

The outcome is not a conceptual model, but an actionable execution map: what to focus on in the next 6–18 months, where to invest scarce resources, and which opportunities to delay until the foundations are ready.

5. Why this matters beyond Alphabeats

Alphabeats’ story is not unique. Across Europe and beyond, many science‑ and technology‑driven ventures reach proof‑of‑concept, raise a healthy first round, get some media attention, and then stall in this “messy middle”.

They do not fail because the technology is weak or the founders are careless. They fail because the journey from “it works” to “it works as a business” is structurally different from the journey from idea to prototype. It requires a different way of thinking, a different discipline, and often a different team and partner configuration.

At Growth Lantern, the ambition is to make that middle part less opaque.

By introducing a structured, evidence-based perspective on venture maturity and growth, together with pragmatic, hands-on execution support, we seek to address the specific needs of distinct stakeholders in the deep-tech innovation ecosystem. For investors, our approach provides actionable tools to enhance due diligence accuracy and better evaluate the growth capacity of ventures. Ecosystem leaders benefit from clearer diagnostic frameworks to shape more effective innovation support structures. Policymakers can utilise these insights to design targeted interventions that promote sustainable economic development and the translation of research into market impact. Founders, meanwhile, are equipped with practical strategies to build more resilient and scalable enterprises. Through this multifaceted engagement, we strengthen each group's collective capacity to foster long-term value creation and sustainable growth within the broader deep-tech landscape.

If you lead or support ventures in this space and want to explore how this lens might apply to your portfolio, we invite you to get in touch.

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