Neuralink
| Neuralink | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Type | Private company |
| Industry | Neurotechnology, Brain-computer interfaces |
| Founded | July 2016 |
| Founder | Elon Musk, Max Hodak, Benjamin Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Paul Merolla, Philip Sabes, Timothy J. Gardner, Tim Hanson, Vanessa Tolosa |
| Headquarters | Fremont, California, United States |
| Notable Personnel | Jared Birchall (CEO), Elon Musk (owner) |
| Products | N1 implant, R1 surgical robot, Telepathy, Blindsight |
| Website | https://neuralink.com |
Neuralink is an American neurotechnology company that develops implantable Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), surgically placed devices that read electrical activity from the brain so a person can control external hardware and software by thought. The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Fremont, California.[1] Its first device, marketed as Telepathy, is a coin-sized implant called the N1 that uses 1,024 electrodes spread across 64 flexible threads inserted into the motor cortex by a dedicated surgical robot, the R1.[2]
Neuralink was co-founded by Elon Musk together with eight scientists and engineers, including Max Hodak, Benjamin Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Paul Merolla, Philip Sabes, Timothy J. Gardner, Tim Hanson, and Vanessa Tolosa.[1] Musk owns more than half of the company, and Jared Birchall is its chief executive.[1] The stated near-term goal is to restore function to people with paralysis or sensory loss; the longer-term goal Musk has described is a high-bandwidth link between the human brain and computers. The company's relevance to virtual and augmented reality comes from this same idea: a direct neural channel could one day replace handheld controllers for input and, through stimulation, deliver synthetic sensory output.[3]
History
Neuralink was registered as a medical research company in 2016 and first reported publicly in early 2017.[1] The company kept a low profile until July 2019, when it presented its first system: an array of thin polymer threads carrying electrodes, inserted by a robot, connected to custom recording chips.[1] Of the eight original co-founders, most had departed by early 2022; Benjamin Rapoport left in 2018 and later co-founded a competing BCI company, Precision Neuroscience, and Max Hodak left in 2021.[1]
Public demonstrations preceded human trials. In August 2020 Neuralink showed a pig named Gertrude with an implant streaming live neural signals, and in April 2021 it published a video of a macaque moving a cursor to play the video game Pong using only neural activity.[1] The animal program drew criticism: advocacy groups alleged poor welfare and unnecessary deaths among test animals, which Neuralink disputed, and a 2023 United States Department of Agriculture review reported no breaches beyond a single earlier incident.[1]
The first in-human implant took place on January 29, 2024, in Noland Arbaugh, a man in his late twenties with quadriplegia from a spinal cord injury.[4] By the time of the June 2025 funding round, five people had received the implant; by late 2025 the number had grown to twelve recipients across three countries, with trials extending to Canada and the United Kingdom.[5][1]
Technology
The N1 implant is a sealed, coin-sized package roughly 23 millimeters across.[1] It carries 1,024 electrode contacts distributed across 64 threads.[2] Each thread is thinner than a human hair and is made mostly of polyimide with a thin gold or platinum conductor.[2] The implant is wireless and is charged inductively, and it sits flush with the skull so that it is not visible once the surgical site heals.[1]
Because the threads are too fine and flexible for a human surgeon to place by hand, Neuralink built the R1 surgical robot to insert them.[2] The robot uses a fine needle to thread the electrode array into the cortex while attempting to avoid blood vessels; in the company's published descriptions the needle inserts wires at a rate of several per minute.[1] The recording electronics digitize neural spikes on the implant and detect activity on-chip, which reduces the amount of data sent off the device.[1]
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Electrode contacts | 1,024[2] |
| Threads | 64[2] |
| Thread material | Polyimide with gold or platinum conductor[2] |
| Implant size | About 23 mm (coin-sized)[1] |
| Power | Wireless, inductively recharged battery[1] |
| Implantation | R1 surgical robot, placed in motor cortex[2] |
Products
Neuralink markets the motor BCI under the name Telepathy. It is intended to let people with paralysis control a computer cursor, keyboard, and other devices by intending to move.[5] A second product, Blindsight, is a visual prosthesis: rather than reading from the motor cortex, it places a microelectrode array in the visual cortex and stimulates neurons to produce simple visual percepts.[6] The United States Food and Drug Administration granted Blindsight a breakthrough device designation in September 2024, a status meant to speed development and review; the device aims to provide vision to people who have lost both eyes and the optic nerve, with early image quality expected to be very low resolution.[6]
Clinical trials
The first human study is the PRIME study (Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface), an early-feasibility trial that enrolls people with quadriplegia from cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.[1] The first participant, Noland Arbaugh, used the implant to move his MacBook cursor, browse the web, and play games including chess and Civilization VI online, as well as Mario Kart, by thought alone.[4]
Performance is measured in bits per second (BPS), a standard rate for cursor control. In his first sessions Arbaugh set a BCI cursor record of 4.6 BPS, and later reached 8.0 BPS while trying to approach the roughly 10 BPS a Neuralink engineer reached using a physical mouse.[4] Some of the implant's threads retracted from the brain in the weeks after surgery, reducing the number of working electrodes; Neuralink reported recovering most of the lost performance by changing its recording and signal-decoding software.[4]
Funding
Neuralink has raised money privately throughout its history. A 2019 round brought in about 158 million dollars, of which roughly 100 million came from Musk.[1] In 2023 the company raised a Series D of about 280 million dollars.[5] In June 2025 Neuralink closed a Series E of 650 million dollars at a pre-money valuation of about 9 billion dollars, led by ARK Invest, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital, with stated plans to scale manufacturing, expand clinical sites, and pursue regulatory approvals.[5]
| Year | Round | Amount (USD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Private | ~$158 million | ~$100M from Elon Musk[1] |
| 2023 | Series D | ~$280 million | Plus a later ~$43M tranche[5] |
| 2025 | Series E | $650 million | ~$9B pre-money; ARK Invest, Founders Fund, Sequoia, Thrive[5] |
Relevance to virtual and augmented reality
Neuralink does not make VR or AR headsets, and as of 2026 it has not shipped any consumer product. Its relevance to immersive technology is as a potential input and output channel that bypasses the hands and the eyes, the two interfaces that current Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality systems depend on.
On the input side, a motor BCI addresses a long-standing problem in immersive computing: text entry and precise control are awkward inside a headset, where users cannot see a physical keyboard and rely on tracked controllers or Input Devices. The demonstrations from the PRIME study, in which Arbaugh moved a cursor and played games by intending to move, are the same class of control that VR commentators have argued could eventually replace handheld controllers entirely.[7] VR-focused writers covering Neuralink in 2019 made the same point, noting that "thinking" the words to type would be more comfortable than typing in mid-air, and that motor-cortex reading could give people with disabilities functional control inside virtual environments.[3] This is the speculative endpoint of input methods that immersive computing already pursues in non-invasive form, such as the surface-electromyography wristband sold as the Meta Neural Band, which reads electrical signals from forearm muscles to control Meta's glasses without a controller.[8]
On the output side, the Blindsight visual prosthesis is the more direct link to displays. A headset renders images onto screens in front of the eyes; a cortical visual implant instead stimulates the visual cortex to create percepts without any screen at all.[6] Writers covering the BCI and VR intersection have framed direct cortical stimulation as the most extreme version of a head-mounted display, one that could in principle inject imagery, and eventually other sensations, straight into perception, though they stress this remains far from any product.[7][3] Game-industry researchers, including Valve experimental psychologist Mike Ambinder, have separately discussed using brain signals to adapt games to a player's emotional state, a softer form of the same convergence; Valve head Gabe Newell has publicly expressed interest in BCIs for games.[7]
These applications are prospective. Neuralink's published work to date concerns medical use in people with paralysis or blindness, not entertainment, and independent VR coverage consistently describes consumer brain-to-headset interfaces as many years away because of surgical risk, signal quality, and regulation.[3][7]
Current status
As of mid-2026 Neuralink remains a private company conducting early-feasibility clinical trials rather than selling a product.[5] Twelve people had received the N1 implant by late 2025 across three countries, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and the company has stated plans to widen enrollment internationally.[1][5] The Telepathy motor interface is in active trials, and the Blindsight visual implant holds an FDA breakthrough designation but had not begun human implantation as of the latest reporting.[6][5]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 "Neuralink". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 "Link N1". https://www.bionic-vision.org/implants/link-n1.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Neuralink announces new BCI: why us VR people should care". 2019-07-18. https://skarredghost.com/2019/07/18/neuralink-bci-virtual-reality-vr/.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 "Neuralink Patient's Implants Slipped Out, But He Still Set a Brain Control Record". 2024-05-08. https://decrypt.co/230021/neuralink-implant-patient-gaming-sets-bci-record.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 "Elon Musk's Neuralink closes a $650M Series E". 2025-06-02. https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/02/elon-musks-neuralink-closes-a-650m-series-e/.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 "Neuralink obtains breakthrough designation from FDA for Blindsight device". 2024-09-18. https://www.medicaldevice-network.com/news/neuralink-breakthrough-fda-blindsight-device/.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 "Digital Frontier: Where Brain-computer Interfaces and AR/VR Could One Day Meet". 2019-09-04. https://roadtovr.com/future-brain-computer-interface-ar-vr/.
- ↑ "Introducing Meta Ray-Ban Display and the Meta Neural Band". 2025-09-17. https://about.fb.com/news/2025/09/meta-ray-ban-display-ai-glasses-emg-wristband/.