CTRL-labs

CTRL-labs
Information
Industry	Neural interfaces, human-computer interaction
Founded	2015
Founder	Thomas Reardon, Patrick Kaifosh, Tim Machado
Headquarters	New York City, United States
Notable Personnel	Thomas Reardon (CEO), Patrick Kaifosh (chief scientist), Adam Berenzweig (director of R&D), Josh Duyan (chief strategy officer)
Products	CTRL-kit
Parent	Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook; acquired 2019)

CTRL-labs was a New York neural-interface startup that built a wrist-worn electromyography (EMG) controller, which reads the electrical activity of forearm muscles and turns intended hand and finger movements into computer input. It was founded in 2015 by Thomas Reardon, Patrick Kaifosh and Tim Machado, who had trained in neuroscience at Columbia University. Reardon, the CEO, had earlier led the Microsoft team that built Internet Explorer.

The company raised US$67 million from investors including GV, Lux Capital and Amazon's Alexa Fund, and in December 2018 announced its first developer kit, the CTRL-kit. Facebook announced on 23 September 2019 that it would acquire CTRL-labs and place it in Facebook Reality Labs, its virtual reality and augmented reality division. The team's wristband research at Meta later led to the Meta Neural Band, which went on sale with Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses on 30 September 2025.

Reviewed 11 October 2026. Founders, funding, CTRL-kit, Myo patents, OpenXR, the Facebook deal, Reardon's later roles, the 2025 Nature paper and the Neural Band lineage checked against each cited source. About review dates.

History

Founding

Reardon joined Microsoft in 1990 and spent about ten years there, where he led the Internet Explorer project. He later worked as CTO at Phone.com and Openwave, left the technology industry in 2003, earned a classics degree, and then completed a doctorate in neuroscience, splitting his PhD work between Duke University and Columbia University. In a 2018 interview he said the three founders were wrapping up their graduate studies when they decided against academic careers and set out to commercialize neuroscience laboratory techniques. Kaifosh became the company's chief scientist. Fuel Capital, an early investor, wrote that Reardon was a Columbia PhD student when he teamed up with fellow PhD students and engineers to start the company. VentureBeat gives the founding year as 2015, and Engadget described CTRL-labs as a four-year-old company in September 2019.

Fuel Capital described two early demonstrations. In one, sensors learned a user's neural patterns while the person typed on a keyboard, after which the user typed on a bare tabletop. In the other, a user rested a hand flat on a table and imagined moving the fingers, and the sensors picked up the resulting neural signals well enough to play an Asteroids-style game without visible hand movement. By November 2018 the company had 42 employees, about half of them PhD scientists.

Funding

Fuel Capital invested in the company's first funding round alongside Spark Capital, Matrix Partners and Breyer Capital. On 30 May 2018 Lux Capital announced a US$28 million Series A round that it co-led with GV. Vulcan Capital, Founders Fund and the Amazon Alexa Fund took part alongside the existing investors Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, Breyer Capital and Fuel Capital, and the round brought total financing to US$39 million. A second US$28 million round, led by GV with participation from the Alexa Fund, Lux Capital, Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, Breyer Capital and Fuel Capital, was reported in February 2019 and took the total raised to US$67 million. The company said it would use the money to grow its San Francisco research lab, support commercial partnerships, and build and distribute the CTRL-kit.

Date	Round	Amount	Lead investors	Source
May 2018	Series A	US$28 million	Lux Capital and GV (co-leads)
February 2019	Not stated	US$28 million	GV
Total by February 2019	US$67 million

Myo patents and OpenXR

In June 2019 CTRL-labs bought the patents behind the Myo armband from North, the company formerly called Thalmic Labs, which had announced in October 2018 that it would stop selling the US$200 armband. VentureBeat reported that the patents covered EMG applications, including sensing hardware, software and human-computer interaction inventions; chief strategy officer Josh Duyan said the company would integrate the Myo IP pool with its developer offering. At the same time CTRL-labs joined the Khronos Group's OpenXR working group; the company said the membership reflected its wish to support and collaborate with the extended reality developer community.

Acquisition by Facebook

Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's vice president of AR and VR, announced the agreement to acquire CTRL-labs in a Facebook post on 23 September 2019. He wrote that the wristband would "decode those signals and translate them into a digital signal your device can understand" and that the aim was to "build this kind of technology at scale" and get it into consumer products faster. Facebook did not disclose the price. Bloomberg reported it at between US$500 million and US$1 billion, while CNBC reported a figure of about US$1 billion. TechCrunch reported that the acquisition also brought North's armband patents to Facebook. Reardon was to join Facebook, and CTRL-labs employees could choose to do the same.

The deal had not yet closed when Reardon spoke at Web Summit in Lisbon in November 2019. He called AR and VR "obvious targets" for the technology because they lacked good control methods, and said neural interfaces would reach consumers in less than five years.

Products

Product	Type	Announced	Details
CTRL-kit	EMG developer kit	December 2018	16 electrodes; wrist-worn enclosure the size of a "large watch", wired to an electrode component further up the arm; wirelessly tethered to a PC for some processing; SDK with JavaScript and TypeScript toolchains using WebSockets

TechCrunch reported the CTRL-kit announcement on 10 December 2018 and said the company planned to begin shipping it in the first quarter of 2019. The kit tracked finger movements by measuring electrical impulses in the arm and was not yet miniaturized; the company said it intended to move to a wrist-worn form factor similar to a smartwatch. VentureBeat reported that the kit was unveiled at Slush in Helsinki that month, that in February 2019 it was in preview for select partners, that earlier prototypes had been wired to a Raspberry Pi, and that its machine learning models were trained with TensorFlow to separate individual nerve pulses.

Reardon described most control tasks as combining continuous input, like a joystick, with discrete input such as button presses and typing. Reardon described two modes: "Myo control", which decoded the signals sent to muscles, even before a movement starts, and worked for new users without calibration, and "Neuro control", which trained users to control individual neurons with a model tailored to each person. Engadget noted that the device does not read thoughts directly; it detects the electrical signals produced by muscle fibers.

XR work

CTRL-labs pitched its technology mainly as an input method for virtual reality and augmented reality. Reardon argued in 2018 that virtual, augmented and mixed reality had not solved how users express their intentions, and that "no immersive computing technology so far has won." TechCrunch wrote that VR had the most obvious use cases for the CTRL-kit and that the company expected developers to focus first on games. VentureBeat reported in June 2019 that games, VR games in particular, were expected to be the early focus.

After the acquisition the team became part of Facebook Reality Labs. A March 2021 Facebook post on wrist-based input for AR glasses described Reardon as the group's Director of Neuromotor Interfaces, "who joined the FRL team when Facebook acquired CTRL-labs in 2019", and said the CTRL-labs team had since made progress on personalized models, reducing the time needed to train custom keyboard models for an individual's typing. In February 2024 UploadVR reported that Reardon had led the wristband project since the acquisition. Two months later, MIXED reported, citing The Information, that Reardon would leave Meta in May 2024 and remain an adviser.

In July 2025 Reality Labs researchers published a paper in Nature on a generic surface EMG wristband interface that works across users without per-person calibration; Kaifosh and Reardon are its two named authors, credited as equal contributors on behalf of the group "CTRL-labs at Reality Labs", and both list Reality Labs at Meta in New York as their affiliation. The paper reports a median handwriting rate of 20.9 words per minute for test users with the generic model. heise online reported that the wristband was based on technology from CTRL-labs and that in the handwriting test users traced letters with a finger on a flat surface. Meta announced the Meta Neural Band on 17 September 2025 and included it with every pair of Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, at a price starting at US$799 for the glasses and band, with sales at limited US retailers from 30 September 2025. Meta said the band drew on research with nearly 200,000 participants. Earlier, in March 2023, UploadVR had relayed a report by The Verge on an internal Meta presentation, writing that the neural wristband planned for Meta's display glasses was based on CTRL-labs technology.

See also

• Electromyography
• Meta Neural Band
• Myo
• Reality Labs
• Brain-computer interface