Who we are

We are a nimble team of experienced investors, entrepreneurs and doers who believe that the world was not built with neurodiverse humans in mind. We feel a sense of urgency to change that. We are quirky and neurodiverse ourselves, and we don't hide it. We practice what we preach.

Founder’s Story

Dikla Treves, the Founder and CEO of Planet 9 Studios always observes people around her as they go through their daily lives. As she often does, she asked a few questions to herself - WHY so many human experiences have to be so difficult, HOW this impacts our quality of life as individuals and as a society more broadly, and WHAT can be done about it?

Following the “there are no stupid questions” rule to a fault, she kept finding acute and unmet human problems and spent most of her career building solutions to try to solve them with the help of extraordinary people and leveraging the extraordinary technology advancements we’ve been fortunate to live through in the past two decades.

Her journey as a parent of a neurodiverse child (through which she discovered her own neurodiversity) started over a decade ago and became a life journey that opened her eyes to one of the biggest human problems she ever observed: Millions and millions of incredible young neurodiverse humans and their families, who are facing unfathomable, “Mount-Everest-high” levels of hardship and challenges that are complex, numerous and span the gamut across a very broad range of “human living” domains.

While there are endless ways to help this vast problem, solutions are few and far between; effective, affordable and practical solutions at scale are almost non-existent. So questions started popping into her mind, and they didn’t stop. 

Then, she met Fred Poses, an inspiring and caring human-being, investor and builder who founded two great organizations (Understood and Difference Partners) with a mission to improve the lives of neurodiverse humans. When Fred and Dikla started talking about what more can be done to further this mission - they couldn’t stop. This led them to the creation of Planet 9.

Our Mission

Leveraging our deep understanding of consumers’ psyche and our extensive experience in this category, we build companies that harvest the power of technology, Artificial Intelligence, and evidence-based methods to deliver wide range of high-impact solutions to neurodiverse young humans, their families, and other key stakeholders in their lives

Our unique and “untethered” approach is driving the creation of solutions at an orders-of-magnitude larger scale than anything seen before and that are set to deliver an industry and life-changing impact on the lives of neurodiverse young-humans and the entire ecosystem surrounding them.

The Venture Studio Model

The reason we chose to build a Health Tech Venture Studio to bring our vision to life is twofold. 

The first is simple: the very broad range of consumers we’re serving and the intricate and acute pain points they are facing daily are quite unfathomable, yet the solutions available are few and far between. For over a decade, through our experience and expertise and deep understanding of consumers and market dynamics, we’ve amassed a treasure trove of strategies and ideas to solve these vast industry gaps that will most effectively come to life by building multiple companies, not just one.  

The second reason we chose to build a Venture Studio is to avoid the very high failure rate (+90%) of young companies. As a Venture Studio, we can reduce these high failure rates as we act in essence like a womb by providing for all the essential needs of the “unborn” seed-ideas from day one to a successful launch and post launch growth support. We are able to master the startup creation process and scale it via a strong bench of in-house experienced entrepreneurs, our deep category expertise, and frictionless access to funding via investors who are also our co-founders.

Why “Planet 9”?

Two Caltech astronomers, Konstantin Batygin & Mike Brown, found the existence of a potential new planet named “Planet 9” (or “Planet X”) that is 10X bigger than earth. Planet 9 gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system - a region of domination larger than any of the other known planets—a fact that Brown says makes it "the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system."

Since only two planets have been discovered since ancient times, the discovery of Planet 9 means that “a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system is still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting."

Our vision is to build the “Planet-9” solution for neurodiverse humans: a solution that is massively bigger in scale and impact than anything built before, it’s closer and easier to build than what key industry stakeholders may think, and we can use the power of technology to get there.