The emerging neurotech industry connecting brains to computers

Brain-computer interfaces and the promise of technological telepathy

Hey Everyone,

As impressive as Apple’s ‘Spatial computing’ is, the advent of BCIs forms one of the major themes of how human beings embody AI in the 21st century. I know, that sounds like a stretch, but hear me out.

Recently I’ve asked a few experts about BCIs, this is the first one in that series.

---

📶 From our sponsor: 📶

Exploiting AI-Generated Code

Join Snyk's Live Hack to dive into the realm of AI-assisted coding tools, specifically GitHub Copilot & ChatGPT. By the end, you'll have built a demo app using AI-assisted coding tools and actively hacked and remediated 3 vulnerabilities! 🤯

---

🙋‍♂️ The event is coming up soon, you don’t want to miss it! 👆

🧠 BCIs 🤯

All you ever wanted to know about the State of the brain computer interface (BCI) in 2024.

Conrad Gray

of Humanity Redefined is one of my favorite authors for transhumanistic and singularity related content.

• His Newsletter is sister publication of ours that covers biotech, synthetic biology, AI, robotics and singularity events in exponential technology.

Recently Conrad has been digging into how BCIs are developing:

1. Brain-Computer Interfaces: The Promise of Technological Telepathy and More

2. Six startups connecting brains with machines

3. So, you have a chip in your brain. Now what?

This article today is related to his recent research into BCIs focusing on the major players and BCI startups.

Support

Your support ensures a bright future for emerging tech discovery across my publications. Get access to the my best deep dives.

---

Imagine you have a question you never heard before and within seconds, you just know the answer. Or you think about turning the lights on and the lights just turn on. Or your friend sends you a message and you can feel exactly what they felt when sending it. This, and many more things, could be possible by connecting our brains to computers.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are often portrayed in science fiction stories, and the possibility of using them to merge human brains with machines to enhance our capabilities is a common topic of discussion in transhumanist circles. These devices, also known as brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), create a direct communication pathway between the brain and an external device, such as a computer, a robot or a prosthetic. BCIs enable individuals to control or interact with technology using their brain activity, or thoughts, alone.

The BCI devices can be either invasive or non-invasive. Non-invasive BCIs are those devices that do not require any surgery as they are not placed inside the head. Because of that, non-invasive BCIs are considered safe and pose little to no risk to the wearer. They are also cheaper, can be easily put on and taken off, more accessible, and easier to use. However, what makes them safe—being outside the brain—also causes issues. Since the electrodes are placed on the head and not inside the brain, they cannot record brain activity with high resolution.

Invasive BCIs, on the other hand, require open brain surgery to install electrodes which can be placed on the surface of the brain (a semi-invasive approach if they do not penetrate into the brain) or inserted deep into the brain. Invasive devices offer a much greater signal-to-noise ratio and the overall quality of the signal compared to non-invasive methods. However, these methods require open brain surgery, which comes with huge risks for the patient.

BCI technology has seen steady progress over the last 10 years. The number of published publications grew 35-fold between 2000 and 2021. Over 80% of high-impact neuroscience publications are produced by only 10 countries, with the US and China topping the list.

Government investments, particularly from DARPA and the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Initiative, have helped propel neurotech massively forward in the last 20 years. In total, government investments in this field have exceeded $6 billion since 2013. Private investment has also been interested in neurotech space, pouring over $33 billion from 2010 to 2020. In 2023, neurotech attracted more than $8 billion in VC investment, according to PitchBook.

Around 2016, a new wave of neurotech companies began to emerge. Chief among them was Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Neuralink wasn’t the only one entering the stage but because it was Musk’s latest company, it attracted public attention and sent a signal that neurotechnology is a field worth joining. That same year, another billionaire, Bryan Johnson, announced the launch of his BCI company, Kernel. Synchron, today one of the leading companies in the BCI field, was also founded in 2016.

Big Tech has noticed an opportunity in the emerging neurotech and BCI industry, too. In 2017, Facebook announced they were working on a BCI (Facebook shut down the BCI project in 2021). In 2019, Facebook acquired CTRL-Labs, a company that makes a wristband capable of transmitting electrical signals from the brain into computer input. In 2022, Snap acquired NextMind, to help drive long-term augmented reality research efforts within Snap Lab. Gaming giant Valve is also collaborating with OpenBCI to explore the integration of EEG-based BCIs with VR headsets.

Notable BCI companies and startups

Neuralink

If you ask a random person to name any BCI company, there's a high chance their answer would be Neuralink. Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Musk and a team of seven scientists and engineers but the world learned about the venture next year with the goal to make devices to treat serious brain diseases in the short term. The long-term goal of the company is to achieve “symbiosis with artificial intelligence” by creating BCIs that enhance human mental capabilities.

Currently, the company is working on their N1 brain implant. The implant is designed to fit under the skull without the need to use cables. The neural activity, recorded with 1024 electrodes distributed across 64 threads, is sent wirelessly to an external device. N1 also has a built-in battery charged wirelessly, which removes the need for any ports or cables sticking out from the head.

Apart from the N1, Neuralink is also developing R1, a surgical robot, which is used to insert the implant into the brain. The company claims R1 is able to perform the surgery better than any human neurosurgeon as the threads that contain the electrodes are too small and fragile for a human to handle. Neuralink is the only BCI company developing this kind of robot. Introducing automation has the potential to reduce the cost of inserting the implants into the brain and make it easier to scale up the operations, assuming the technology catches on and more people will be interested in having Neuralink’s implant in their heads.

The first public demo of Neuralink’s implant in action was in 2020. During the live event, the company showed a working device implanted in a pig showing that the implant can read neural activity from the animal’s brain. In April 2021, Neuralink released another demo, this time with a monkey playing Pong using Neuralink’s implant. Although this kind of experiment is not something new in the field, it was a big milestone for the company and has shown its implant in action for the first time.

Monkey MindPong Picture-in-Picture

In both these demos, the implanted devices were only reading the neural activity. However, at the end of 2022, Neuralink showed their devices can also stimulate nerves and cause a pig to move its leg through a device implanted in the pig’s spinal cord.

In late 2022, reports emerged that the company is under investigation for animal cruelty and is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General for breaching the Animal Welfare Act. Neuralink has reportedly terminated around 1,500 animals, including sheep, pigs, and monkeys, in experiments since 2018. This figure is considered a rough estimate due to the company's imprecise record-keeping on animal testing. The report also reveals an internal culture at Neuralink that pressures employees to expedite work, driven by Elon Musk's aggressive timelines. This environment has contributed to mistakes and a higher rate of animal testing and euthanasia.

In April 2023, Neuralink received approval from the FDA to launch clinical trials on humans and in September of the same year, the company opened recruitment for their first human trial. On January 29th 2024, Elon Musk announced the first human has received Neuralink’s brain implant. A month later, Elon Musk said the patient was controlling a computer mouse with thoughts.

To date, Neuralink has raised $686.2 million in funding and is reportedly valued at around $5 billion.

Blackrock Neurotech

You might not have heard about Blackrock Neurotech before but their story and technology are deeply intertwined with the story of brain implants.

Although the company we know today as Blackrock Neurotech was founded in 2008 as Blackrock Microsystems, the story of technology used by Blackrock begins in 1989 with the invention of Utah Array by Richard A. Normann at the University of Utah (hence the name of the device). For the next 30 years, Utah Arrays have been instrumental in neuroscience research and medical applications, particularly in the field of neuroprosthetics.

Utah Arrays were used in many breakthrough experiments exploring the concept of connecting brains and computers. In 2002, Utah Arrays were successfully implanted in three monkeys allowing them to control a cursor, almost 19 years before Neuralink conducted a similar experiment in 2021. In 2004, the first Utah Array was implanted in a human as a part of the BrainGate project.

[Image caption: Blackrock’s Utah Electrode Array. Source: Blackrock Neurotech]

Utah Arrays have proven to be a valuable tool in BCI research and development. They have been used in over 1700 published studies where they were shown to be successfully used to control prosthetics, send emails and text messages using only thoughts and translate thoughts into text, among other applications. They also have been used in restoring a sense of touch, as shown in this experiment in which Nathan Copeland was able to sense which finger of the robotic hand had been touched as if it was his own hand (Nathan has been using BCIs since 2014 and holds the record for the longest use of a BCIs).

Today, Blackrock offers not only newer versions of Utah Arrays but an entire catalogue of tools designed to help neuroscientists in their research projects. But the company does not stop here and is still innovating. In 2022, Blackrock revealed Neuralace, a next-generation BCI featuring an extremely flexible lace-structured chip designed to be placed on the brain's surface. The initial version of Neuralace will offer 10,000 channels (for comparison, other BCIs usually don’t go beyond 1024 channels) for monitoring brain activity, with Blackrock indicating the potential for scaling beyond this number in the future. The company expects to make Neuralace available to the neuroscience research community by 2024 and aims for the first-in-human demonstrations of a Neuralace visual prosthesis by 2028.

Neuralace™ | The next-generation of BCI and whole-brain data capture

---

Try my New Newsletter about AI chips and the Semi Industry

I have started a new Newsletter on the AI chip sector called Semiconductor Things™.

• This Newsletter was built to solve the pain point of getting the latest news on A.I. chips, semiconductors, datacenter innovation and chip news.

• If that interests you, you’re welcome to sign-up before it launches.

• Learn more.

---

Synchron

One of the drawbacks of invasive BCIs is the fact that they have to be placed into the brain. That allows them to read neural activity with high precision. But to do that, a team of highly-trained neurosurgeons is required who can perform this risky operation.

However, Synchron has found a way to insert electrodes into the brain without resorting to risky surgery on an open brain. Inspired by coronary stents, they created Stentrode - a 16-electrode array BCI designed to resemble a stent that is inserted into the jugular vein in the neck and pushed up a blood vessel to the motor cortex in the brain. When it reaches its destination, it unfolds like a flower in the blood vessel to not disrupt the flow of the blood and starts recording the electrical activity from the nearby neurons.

[Image caption: Unfolded Stentrode brain implant. Source: Synchron]

Once the Stentrode is in place, it is connected with a cable to a small antenna placed under the skin in the chest which then sends raw brain activity data wirelessly to an external device. Synchron’s approach is safer and more accessible than other invasive devices, as it does not require open-brain surgery and a team of specialised neurosurgeons.

A Brain Implant That Turns Your Thoughts Into Text | Tom Oxley | TED

Stent electrodes are a new class of invasive BCI and they have already proven themselves to work. In 2022, a man with ALS was able to send text messages from his iPad thanks to Stentrode implanted in his brain. In August 2020, Synchron received the FDA's Breakthrough Device designation for its potential to enhance treatment for serious health conditions. The next year, it was the first to gain FDA approval for human trials of a permanently implantable BCI.

In January 2023, results from a long-term safety study of Stentrode in Australia have been published. The study found that the technology remained safe and didn’t deteriorate in signal quality or performance over a 12-month period. Stentrode has been implanted in four people in Australia and six in the US.

Synchron has raised $130 million so far, with investors including Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos. The company’s value is estimated to be around $1 billion. As CNBC reports, the company has not yet started generating revenue and has not disclosed the eventual cost of the procedure. Of all new BCI companies, Synchron is the closest to receiving approval from the FDA to sell its product.

Kernel

Kernel is another relatively new player in the BCI field founded by billionaire Bryan Johnson to hack the human brain. Revealed in 2016, Kernel’s initial plan involved building an invasive brain implant to help people with memory problems caused by Alzheimer’s, dementia or stroke. However, the long-term goal is to enhance human intelligence.

However, in 2018, Kernel has changed its approach. The company switched scientific advisors, hired a new team and scraped the idea of a brain implant in favour of focusing on developing a non-invasive device to record and stimulate the brain.

In May 2020, Kernel introduced two brain-activity monitoring devices, Flux and Flow. Flow uses fNIRS, a technique that uses infrared light to measure changes in the oxygenation of blood. This light is then absorbed and scattered by haemoglobin, allowing a detector to infer the blood's oxygen level and, from there, infer neural activity, as active brain regions consume more oxygen. By detecting changes in these absorption patterns, fNIRS can deduce brain activity.

Flux, on the other hand, worked by measuring small changes in magnetic fields caused by neural activity. In 2021, Kernel discontinued work on Flux in favour of focusing all efforts on Flow.

Lex Fridman wears the Kernel Flow brain-computer interface

In 2023, Kernel launched the second generation Flow2 device that improved the performance of the first generation of Flow.

The company also began two observational clinical trials to evaluate their ability to measure brain-based biomarkers. The first trial aims to predict treatment response in depression while the second focuses on detecting early signs of mild cognitive impairment.

To date, Kernel has raised $158.2 million in total funding, of which $100 million came from Johnson's initial investment in 2016, and $53 million came from a Series C funding round in 2020.

OpenBCI

Of all the companies featured in this article, OpenBCI is unique as it is the only open-source company on this list. Founded in 2014 after a successful Kickstarter campaign, OpenBCI offers open-source tools for biosensing and neuroscience. Their mission is to lower the barrier to entry for BCIs and neurotech.

OpenBCI offers everything that’s needed to start experimenting with non-invasive EEG BCIs, from hardware such as electronics and electrodes to software needed to process the brain activity data coming from the sensors.

In 2018, OpenBCI revealed Galea, an AR/VR headset that can not only measure the wearer’s brain activity with built-in EEG but also measure heart rate, skin, muscles, and eyes. In the future, Galea might also have non-invasive neurostimulation features. The headset is projected to start being delivered in Q3 2024.

A Powerful New Neurotech Tool for Augmenting Your Mind | Conor Russomanno | TED

By democratizing neurotech and making it accessible, OpenBCI plays an important role in the neurotech ecosystem. Thanks to their open-source hardware and software, many people have the opportunity to build their own BCIs, experiment with the technology, and perhaps even take the first step in their careers in neurotech.

Precision Neuroscience

Precision Neuroscience is the youngest company on this list. It was founded in 2021 by Michael Mager and Benjamin Rapoport, the latter of whom was the founding member of Neuralink.

Similarly to Neuralink, the team at Precision Neuroscience is developing an invasive BCI. But unlike Neuralink, their BCI named The Layer 7 Cortical Interface, is designed to be placed on the surface of the brain and not penetrate deep into the brain. The device consists of an array of 1024 electrodes placed on a thin film. The device is 1/5th the thickness of a human hair and can be inserted through a narrow slit incision in the skull, eliminating the need to remove large pieces of the skull and thereby making the procedure safer than other invasive methods.

[Image caption: The Layer 7 Cortical Interface. Source: Precision Neuroscience]

Precision Neuroscience has raised $53 million to develop its neural implant. In June 2023, the company completed the first-in-human procedures for a pilot clinical study of its Layer 7 Cortical Interface. The study aims to achieve unprecedented detail in recording and mapping brain activity and plans to apply to the FDA for clearance of its device for diagnostic electrophysiology mapping procedures for up to 30 days.

The company also revealed that in mid-April 2023, a patient undergoing brain tumour resection was the first to receive the Layer 7 implant, allowing neurosurgeons to read and map brain activity. Since then, two more patients have undergone similar procedures and the company plans to enroll up to five more patients.

The long path towards mainstream BCIs

By

Conrad Gray

of Humanity Redefined, March, 2024.

Brain-computer interfaces are an emerging technology that is worth keeping an eye on. These devices are being used in clinical trials to restore the ability to communicate for patients suffering from locked-in syndrome and restore mobility by enabling patients to control exoskeletons or robotic arms. They have been also used to treat various neurological and mental diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, depression or chronic pain.

Outside medicine, BCIs hold the promise to completely redefine how we interact with computers, robots and even with each other. Some even imagine a future where we have merged our brains with computers as a way of unlocking full human potential and ensuring humanity’s survival in the age of superintelligent AIs.

However, it will take years for BCIs, especially invasive ones, to become as accessible as Lasik surgery is today. An enormous amount of research and development needs to be done to ensure these devices are worth having inside our heads. On top of that, there are some challenging questions to answer. How can we make BCIs safe and secure? What happens when the device malfunctions or becomes obsolete? How can we ensure the privacy of thoughts is upheld?

Nevertheless, brain-computer interfaces and the emerging neurotech industry as a whole are worth keeping an eye on. Some big names are entering the scene, bringing with them big money and public attention. We might see some amazing breakthroughs coming from neurotech in the coming years.

Support independent Publications & Discover strong argument and striking art with a Newsletter subscription.