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The Neurotech industry gets a bad rap. When most people hear the word “Neurotech”, their mind instantly jumps to Elon Musk’s “Neuralink”.
And unsurprisingly, for a company that wants to put chips in your brain, having an egomaniacal, hyper-controversial CEO may not leave a great first impression on the general public.
Many other Neurotech companies face the same optics problem. Consider the company Blackrock Neurotech (not to be confused with the asset manager BlackRock). I don’t think I could make a more sinister-sounding company name if I tried. These poor optics may cause people to dismiss the company and the Neurotech industry as a whole as evil maniacs who want to control our minds.
Conversely, Blackrock Neurotech has brought genuine miracles onto Earth. Using their own Brain-Computer Interface, the company has given autonomy to over 40 paralyzed patients, allowing otherwise immobilized individuals to use their brain chips to control robotic arms, regain their speech, or even play video games.
Dozens of human beings - who would be otherwise totally dependent on others — now not only have agency over their lives, but also hope. This is a common story among other companies in the industry as well.
The founders and leading engineers at neurotech companies like Blackrock Neurotech aren’t in the game for the money. Making money working on another B2B AI app or another GPT wrapper is an order of magnitude easier and has far higher expected value.
No, the people working at neurotech companies do what they do to bring down miracles from the heavens. To transcend the limitations of our meat and flesh. To make the world a more beautiful place, one filled with less sickness and misery. Whether restoring vision to the blind, giving autonomy to quadriplegics, or eliminating addiction: neurotech is fundamentally about transcending the limitations of nature and using our newfound power to fill the world with goodness.
In this post, I’m going to list a few Neurotech companies that I think are doing some great work!
Nudge is probably the most underrated company I have come across.
To understand why Nudge is such a special company, you first have to understand the current state of neuromodulation (defined as techniques that alter brain activity using some stimulus).
Neuromodulation is used to treat a wide variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD, and Parkinson’s. It can be highly effective - but current methods involve a tradeoff between two key variables: non-invasiveness and spacial depth.
If you happen to have a psychiatric disorder that is caused by some malfunctioning deep brain region (the amygdala for anxiety and depression, or the basal ganglia for OCD and addiction), your only option for neuromodulation is surgery involving opening up the skull and inserting electrodes deep inside the brain. Though these methods are usually effective at treating the underlying condition, the invasiveness associated with them comes with large costs and significant risks.
For cases where such invasiveness and risk are out of the question, you’re left with neuromodulation methods that are limited to stimulating the surface of the brain. Methods like transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (rTDCS) cannot reach deep brain regions such as the amygdala, basal ganglia, or the thalamus, and can therefore only treat a subset of neurological disorders (and often not very well!)
That’s where Nudge comes in. Nudge is riding on a bunch of new research in a novel neuromodulation technology - transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS). Instead of altering brain activity using electric current or magnetic fields, tFUS involves sending focused ultrasound waves at specific regions of the brain, turning up or down the activity in the selected brain region based on set ultrasonic parameters.
tFUS isn’t affected by the tradeoff that other neuromodulation technologies suffer from. It is simultaneously perfectly non-invasive, as transducers (ultrasound generators) can be placed outside the skull, and can target deeper brain regions by combining multiple transducers together.
The world Nudge envisions is one where non-invasive and effective neuromodulation devices become as cheap and portable as the smartphone, bringing us to a world where millions – and eventually billions – of people have a healthier mind. In their words:
Imagine a future where chronic pain can be relieved without opioids, where a patient with PTSD can regulate traumatic recall in real time, where clinicians can image and modulate brain circuits as easily as checking a patient’s heart rate. Imagine a future where focus can be enhanced without caffeine, where learning a new language or skill takes days or weeks, rather than months or years.
This future isn’t science fiction, it’s an engineering roadmap. And we’re building it now.
Like Apple at the dawn of the personal computer revolution, Nudge wants to bring tFUS to the masses, and usher us into a world where everyone is happier and healthier.
The Nudge Zero
While we’re talking about tFUS, let’s discuss Prophetic.
While Nudge may be the most underrated company I have come across, Prophetic may be the coolest.
Prophetic’s headband “The Halo” allows you to induce lucid dreams in yourself as you sleep, letting you lucid dream on demand.
As of right now, only half the population has had a single lucid dream and less than 1% experience them multiple times a week. Prophetic’s Halo will allow people to lucid dream at will, rather than roll the dice every time they sleep.
The underlying technology for the Halo is actually pretty simple. You put on this headband - which contains two EEG sensors as well as two ultrasonic transducers - before you go to bed. As you’re sleeping, the EEG sensors detect when a user is undergoing REM sleep (the phase of sleep where you dream).
Once the sensors go off, the ultrasound transducers activate and send beams of ultrasound targeted at your prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for conscious thought and self-awareness, and increased activity inside of it during REM sleep is linked to lucid dreaming. The beams of ultrasound stimulate the prefrontal cortex, increasing its activity and thereby inducing a lucid dream.
Unlike Nudge, it is unclear whether Prophetic’s dream will ever become reality. From a glance the theory seems sound, and past studies have succesfully modulated prefrontal cortex activity using tFUS, but none of those studies looked to induce lucid dreams.
This study claims to show that inducing lucid dreams using different neuromodulation technology, tACS, is possible. But a later study by a different group of researchers failed to replicate the original paper, suggesting the findings were a false positive. x
But if Prophetic is right and inducing lucid dreams using tFUS is possible, the possibilities are endless. Many would pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, for a headband that allowed them to lucid dream every night. No synthetic VR experience could compete with the feeling of actually flying around in a lucid dream.
Traditional brain-computer interfaces interact with the brain by piercing brain tissue with tiny electrodes. Companies like Neuralink and Blackrock have been pursuing this approach for many years, but there is reason to be skeptical in the feasibility of the approach.
On the health side, stabbing brain tissue with electrodes causes inflammation, scarring, and neuron death around the electrode sites.
On the technical side, this approach makes it extremely difficult to scale electrode count. Similar to how higher transistor count corresponds with newer and faster software, the more electrodes you have in the brain, the more possibilities open up to you. Neuralink’s Telepathy device currently has an impressive 1096 electrodes, but they are aiming for tens or even hundreds of thousands in the future.
Unfortunately, under current methods, scaling electrode count by such a large factor will also scale neuron damage and death by the same factor. For every electrode that’s implanted, anywhere from 50-1000 electrodes die. As we scale electrode count, we kill more and more neurons.
That’s where Science Corp comes in. Started by Max Hodak, formerly at Neuralink, Science Corp has invented a new method for interfacing with the brain. Instead of sending electrodes down into brain tissue, they have a “biohybrid” BCI that uses lab-grown neurons to form synapses with the brain.
Science Corp grows these artificial neurons in a lab, puts the neurons in tiny “microwells” inside a scaffold, and places the scaffold directly on the brain’s surface. Over time, these artificial neurons form synaptic connections with the neurons in the subject’s brain.
Each microwell has a miniture LED, which can be toggled on and off by the researchers in order to activate the neuron inside that microwell. Once activated, the neuron will send its signal through the connections it’s made with the subject’s neurons.
Science Corporations’ Biohybrid device is a great leap of innovation in BCI technology. For one, their device comes with severely diminished health risks. Since the device replaces the need for piercing brain tissue with electrodes, we no longer have to kill hundreds of neurons for every channel we want to read/write from. No more tissue destruction or inflammation as well.
But that’s not the only benefit. The company’s latest study on their biohybrid device claims that they can fit over 100,000 neurons inside their device., While neurons and electrodes don’t have the same read/write ability, we can loosely say that each neuron in their scaffold corresponds to one channel count, giving us a channel count two orders of magnitude higher than the industry SOTA of 4,096.
I’m bullish on Science Corporation and biohybrid BCIs in general. Piercing the brain with electrodes just can’t scale without significant health drawbacks. Though still in early experimental phases, I expect the industry to shift away from conventional microelectrode implantation. towards biohybrid devices.
Neurotech companies are actually really cool! From creating safe neuromodulation devices that can treat almost any psychiatric disorder - to making a headband that allows you to lucid dream at will, Neurotech companies tend to have hyper-ambitious goals that — if achieved — will make the world a drastically different place.
Though Neuralink gets the lion’s share of media attention and mindshare, I think the smaller, lesser-known startups are doing the more interesting and impactful work.
