Inspired by Stranger Things, Delhi Entrepreneur Builds DIY Neuroscience Kits That Let Users Fly Drones and Play GTA V using brain signals

Neuroscience is the multidisciplinary scientific study of the nervous system, including the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves, spanning from molecular biology to cognitive psychology. In the 21st century, neuroscience has emerged as one of the most critical fields of scientific discovery.  

With a growing global population, the risk of developing neurological disorders is steadily rising. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in three people is likely to develop a neurological condition in their lifetime. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, acute spinal cord injury, ataxia, dementia, and Bell’s palsy are neurological disorders that contribute to significant disability worldwide.

As interest in understanding the human brain and nervous system grows, there is also a rising need for accessible tools that allow students, researchers, and innovators to study these signals.

Founded by Deepak Khatri in 2020, Upside Down Labs offers DIY neuroscience kits starting at a highly accessible price of Rs 499 only.

These DIY neuroscience kits can record biopotential signals from the body, such as brainwaves (EEG), muscle movements (EMG), eye blinks (EOG), and heartbeats (ECG), and convert them into digital data. 

By doing so, they empower everyone from fifth-grade students to elite researchers to build real-time human-computer interfaces, allowing users to do everything from predicting heart health to controlling drones and playing video games using just their muscles and minds.

Upside Down Labs aims to democratise the knowledge of neuroscience so that everyone, from curious students to hobbyists and pioneering researchers, has access to learning the subject practically.

“To learn neuroscience, universities require equipment that costs lakhs or even crores of rupees. Because the tools are so expensive, they are locked away in cabinets, and only a few PhD students get access. If students only get theoretical knowledge, how can we expect them to become neuroscientists?” Deepak Khatri tells Startup Pedia in an exclusive interview.

About the Founder of Upside Down Labs, Deepak Khatri

Born in Dudhwa, Haryana, Deepak moved to Delhi when he was two years old. He has lived, studied, and built his entire life and business in the capital. 

He comes from a supportive middle-class family; his mother is a homemaker, and his father is a government employee.

In 2020, Deepak graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Biotechnology from Netaji Subhas University of Technology (NSUT, formerly NSIT) in New Delhi. 

He benefited significantly from the university’s newly adopted Choice-Based Credit System (CBCS). 

This flexible framework allowed him to bridge the gap between biology and hardware by taking subjects in Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE), Computer Science, and Mathematics, alongside core biotech courses like Computational Biology, Genetics, and rDNA Technology, etc.

He credits much of his early academic encouragement to his school teachers: Anupama (Science), Shashi (Physics), and Gagan (Chemistry).

"Shashi Sir and Gagan Sir taught me their subjects in such a way that, even after all these years, if I read a textbook or look at examples, I am still able to perfectly understand and comprehend the information. I believe they changed many lives, and I am glad I had the privilege to learn from them and have their support alongside my parents,” the New Delhi-based founder says.

The Childhood Passion

In childhood, Deepak was a curious person who loved taking things apart. While his classmates carried geometry boxes filled with pencils and erasers, Deepak’s box was filled with parts like diodes, capacitors, resistors, and transformers taken from broken TVs and old electronics.

As he grew older, his experiments became more creative. In the 9th standard, he used parts from old mosquito rackets to build a small high-voltage shock device and cleverly hid it inside a Melody toffee wrapper.

In 11th standard, his projects became more thoughtful. Using parts from an old CD lens and an NE555 timer, he built a working electronic beating heart and gifted it to his science teacher on Teacher’s Day.

These early experiments, making things from discarded materials, eventually shaped the kind of affordable, open-source hardware he builds today.

"I learned a lot from the electronics that were already in the scrap.  My parents are very happy that the kid who was once a scrap boy is now an engineer building a company catering to students and researchers from over 65+ countries," Deepak tells Startup Pedia.

Initial Journey of Deepak Khatri

The foundation of Upside Down Labs was laid in 2016 as a college project when Deepak Khatri was in his first year of college. After watching a TED Talk by neuroscientist Greg Gage, where he demonstrated human-to-human muscle control, Deepak became fascinated.

However, the equipment needed to recreate the experiment was very expensive. A single chip costs around Rs 750, and the full system would cost over Rs 2,000. Instead of giving up, Deepak decided to build his own version. 

By the end of 2016, he had successfully created his own instrumentation amplifier using simple electronic components and reduced the total cost to just Rs 30. He procured the required parts from the electronics market of Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi.

In 2017, after finishing his first internship, he presented his bionic EMG sensor at a conference by Texas Instruments and won a C2000 DSP Development Board.

Encouraged by this recognition, Deepak launched the first version of Upside Down Labs in 2018 as a small online store on Tindie, a marketplace for hardware makers. 

At that time, he was making everything by hand, etching printed circuit boards (PCBs) at home using copper boards, a laser printer, and chemical solutions.

Between 2019 and early 2020, the project slowly started turning into a serious deep-tech venture. Using the open-source software KiCad, Deepak designed his first professional PCB called BioAmp v1.5.

During this time, he was also selected for Google Summer of Code and received guidance from mentors Jason Kridner and Drew Fustini, who even helped sponsor his first professional batch of PCBs.

In December 2020, Deepak officially registered Upside Down Labs as a proprietorship. To celebrate, he set himself a tough challenge by designing one new product every day for a month. 

During this intense period, he created the company’s flagship product, BioAmp EXG Pill, a small board that can record medical signals such as ECG, EMG, EOG, and EEG.

The year 2021 became a breakthrough. A crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply raised over USD 13,000, showing global interest in the product.

Around the same time, after failing in 2016, 2017, and 2018, Deepak’s team finally succeeded in the India Innovation Challenge for Circuit Design, supported by the Department of Science and Technology (India) and Texas Instruments, ranking among the top 16 teams out of 33,000.

Challenges Faced by Upside Down Labs Founder

Deepak also went through serious personal struggles during his second year at Netaji Subhas University of Technology (NSUT). A long 12-hour daily commute and his own difficulties with communication made college life overwhelming, and he went through a period of depression.

"Everything was all over the place. I was going to college at 8:00 AM and coming back home at 8:00 PM, so 12 hours went by. Back then, I didn't have very good food, many friends, or good communication skills," he recalls.

These communication challenges later affected him professionally as well. He lost a prestigious Google Summer of Code (GSOC) project even after completing nearly 80% of the initial work. Eventually, a student from an IIT took over the project and received the credit.

Although the experience was painful, it became an important learning moment for Deepak. It strengthened his belief that the impact of technology matters more than who gets the credit, and it reinforced his commitment to open-source development.

“This incident taught me something valuable. It’s not your name, or it’s not you that is going to be remembered; it’s the work that matters and how that work is being utilised for educating other people," Upside Down Labs founder tells Startup Pedia. 

Today, the company faces a very different challenge. Due to strong organic and viral marketing, demand for its products has grown much faster than supply. 

The startup’s 15-member team currently faces a production bottleneck due to the manual assembly of cables and accessories. 

While the sensors themselves can be produced efficiently, the cables require time-consuming manual work such as soldering, assembling, gluing, and packaging.

Since the team also includes members from design and marketing, the limited manufacturing workforce slows down production. As a result, the company currently produces about 2,000 units per month, even though its infrastructure could support up to 10,000 units.

About Upside Down Labs

The name Upside Down Labs was inspired by the popular Netflix series Stranger Things. It reflects the messy and experimental state of Deepak’s early lab setup.

The company’s logo is also symbolic. It combines two electronic components, an amplifier and a diode, representing the startup’s idea: we amplify your efforts and rectify your pathway to success.

Upside Down Labs was officially registered in December 2020, although its journey began earlier in 2018 as a small maker store on Tindie. The venture was bootstrapped with a couple of thousand rupees left over from the GSoC stipend savings of its founder.

The New Delhi–based startup aims to make neuroscience accessible to everyone. It designs and sells affordable DIY neuroscience kits that allow users to record signals from the human body.

The company’s main products are small sensors like the BioAmp EXG Pill. These sensors capture tiny electrical signals from the body and convert them into digital data. 

They can record signals such as brain activity (EEG), heart signals (ECG), muscle activity (EMG), and eye movements (EOG).

Traditional 3-channel neuroscience equipment can cost over Rs 13 lakh, but Upside Down Labs offers ready-to-use kits starting from around Rs 9,000, with advanced versions costing about Rs 17,000. The company also makes one of the world’s most affordable EMG sensors, priced at just Rs 499.

The company follows an open-source model, meaning its hardware designs, software code, and documentation are publicly available on GitHub.

How Does the DIY Neuroscience Kit by Upside Down Labs Work?

The human body constantly generates small electrical impulses, called biopotential signals, whenever the heart beats, muscles move, eyes blink, or the brain is active. 

The technology developed by Upside Down Labs captures these biopotential signals and converts them into digital commands. 

The DIY neuroscience kits work in the following steps.

1. Signal Acquisition (Electrodes)

The process starts by placing electrodes on the user’s skin. These electrodes detect very small electrical signals produced by the body. Since the signals are extremely weak, they must first be captured carefully before they can be used.

2. Amplification and Filtering (Sensor)

The signals picked up from the skin are very weak and often mixed with electrical noise. Sensors like the BioAmp EXG Pill amplify these signals so they become strong enough to process.

After amplification, the sensor also filters the signal to remove unwanted noise. For example, if someone wants to measure muscle movement, the system filters out other signals and keeps only the muscle data.

3. Signal Processing (Digitisation)

Once the signal is cleaned, it is sent to a microcontroller board such as the Arduino Uno R4 Minima included in the kits.

These Bio-Potential signals can be very irregular, so software techniques are used to smooth and process the signal. The microcontroller then converts this processed signal into digital data that a computer can understand.

4. Human-Computer Interaction (Action)

After the signal becomes digital, the board can work like an HID keyboard or mouse. This means body signals can control applications on a computer.

For example, when a user flexes their arm, the signal can trigger a command like pressing the spacebar on a computer. This allows users to control robots, drones, or video games using only body signals instead of traditional controllers.

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Four Main Signals the Sensors Can Record

The BioAmp sensors can record four important types of body signals:

• EEG (Electroencephalography): Records brain activity, used for studying focus, sleep, and brain-computer interfaces.

• EMG (Electromyography): Records muscle activity, used in prosthetics, robotics, and gesture-based controls.

• ECG (Electrocardiography): Records heart activity, useful for monitoring heart rate and heart rate variability.

• EOG (Electrooculography): Records eye movements and blinks, often used in assistive technologies for people with severe paralysis.

"With respect to heart health, people have used our machines to take an ECG, feed it into a CNN or convolutional neural network-based systems to predict congestive heart failure. You can predict congestive heart failure way before it actually happens," Deepak tells Startup Pedia, while highlighting the features of DIY Neuroscience kits.

Real-World Applications of DIY Neuroscience Kits

These kits are used to build human-computer interfaces and brain-computer interfaces, which means they can be used in many fields.

Education: Students, including those in schools like Kendriya Vidyalaya, use the kits for science projects. EdTech companies also use them to teach robotics and AI.

Healthcare and Research: Researchers use the data from these devices to study heart signals, build health monitoring systems, and train AI models that can detect heart-related conditions.

Gaming and Robotics: With systems like NPG Lite (Neuro PlayGround Lite), users can control drones, RC cars, and even video games using muscle signals, eye blinks, or brain activity.

The human-to-human interface project that inspired the curious mind to build this innovative startup has now advanced into a wireless Human to Human interface, first unveiled at the India Science Festival 2026, organised by Fast India. 

The wired system they previously built was also tried by DRDO Scientists, Students, Military personnel, and researchers who came to their booth at the IIT Bombay Tech Fest 2025; all of them were amazed to see how such a thing is even possible.

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Manufacturing, Procurement, and Scaling

As Upside Down Labs grew from making circuit boards at home to selling thousands of kits worldwide, Deepak built a mostly local supply chain. Today, the company operates from a two-floor facility in Uttam Nagar, Delhi, using a mix of global sourcing and local manufacturing.

Global Procurement (About 20%)

Around 20% of the components are imported because they require specialised manufacturing.

This includes:

• Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) that are designed by the team but fabricated in China

• Integrated circuit (IC) chips sourced from manufacturers in Taiwan, the Philippines, the USA, and China

In-House Manufacturing (About 80%)

The remaining 80% of the work is done in Delhi. After the PCBs and chips arrive, the team assembles the electronics in-house. This includes placing components on the boards, soldering them, and completing the circuits using a reflow oven.

The team also manually assembles cables, connectors, and accessories. Even the product boxes, instruction manuals, and stickers are produced locally. Before shipping, each sensor goes through three quality checks to ensure it works properly.

"As an engineer, I get the PCBs, apply solder paste, place the components, reflow, test, and package them. We assemble everything in-house and make it into a kit so that every time you receive a sensor, you are assured it will work perfectly when you attach it to the microcontroller," Deepak says.

Business Model and Global Distribution

Upside Down Labs sells its products to a wide range of users, from hobbyists and students to researchers and universities. 

They are trusted by researchers and students at more than 150 prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Yale University, and several IITs across India.

B2B and Institutional Sales

A large part of the company’s revenue comes from business and institutional customers. In India, the startup supplies bulk orders to EdTech and robotics companies such as STEMpedia, which use the neuroscience kits in their learning programs.

The company also sells to government schools and universities. Schools like Kendriya Vidyalaya purchase the kits through the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) portal for science fairs and student projects. 

Top institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, and Indian Institute of Science Bangalore also buy the technology directly.

Global Distributor Network

For international sales, Upside Down Labs works with electronics distributors instead of shipping individual orders overseas. This helps the small team manage logistics more easily.

Key distribution partners include:

• India: Robu.in

• USA: Mouser Electronics and DigiKey Electronics

• Europe: Maxwell Electronics

This distributor model also helps the company handle international regulations. Earlier, the startup tried selling directly on Amazon USA, but biopotential sensors are often classified as medical devices in the US. By selling through distributors like Mouser and DigiKey, those partners handle compliance and shipping to customers.

B2C Sales and High Demand

For individual buyers, the company sells through many platforms like Amazon India, Tindie and its own website (store.upsidedownlabs.tech)

Right now, the company’s biggest challenge is extremely high demand. Because the kits are affordable and widely known among students and researchers, many production batches get pre-booked by distributors even before they are fully assembled.

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Viral Marketing

According to founder Deepak Khatri, this rapid growth did not come from major changes in the product or pricing but from a combination of viral marketing, community engagement, and seasonal demand. 

A key driver was organic social media marketing led by his brother Shivam Khatri, who grew the company’s Instagram page from zero to over 1.53 lakh followers in about 16 months, through featuring engaging DIY projects such as controlling drones, playing Grand Theft Auto V, or moving characters in Baby Steps using muscle signals, and some of these videos have received millions of views, giving the brand global visibility. 

This reach created a strong community-driven marketing loop where students and hobbyists discover the kits online, buy them, and use them for college projects or competitions such as the Smart India Hackathon. 

When students win prizes or recognition, they often share their projects and success stories on LinkedIn and Instagram, which acts as a powerful peer-to-peer promotion and drives new orders. 

The company also benefits from predictable seasonal demand, especially when new college sessions begin or when students start working on final-year projects and hackathons.

Annual Revenue

Upside Down Labs has achieved significant revenue growth while remaining completely bootstrapped, which is rare for a deep-tech hardware startup. 

The company’s financial growth clearly shows increasing market adoption. In FY23, its annual revenue was under Rs 30 lakh. In FY24, the revenue more than doubled to around Rs 70-80 lakh, and in FY25, it is estimated to be around Rs 2 crore. 

Looking Ahead

As global tech companies like Meta develop EMG armbands and ventures such as Neuralink by Elon Musk attract global attention, Deepak Khatri is positioning his bootstrapped startup to play a role in the growing Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) space. 

Over the next 3-5 years, his strategy will focus on making neuroscience tools affordable and accessible for students, hobbyists, and educators. 

"Currently, the sensors we produce in the market are non-invasive, but we are targeting the invasive market as well, where you feed the electrode directly into the brain. My vision is to create a multi-million, and eventually a billion-dollar deep-tech empire from India that creates the 'shovels' for the neuroscience gold rush, making technology like Neuralink accessible to everyone," Deepak concluded.

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