Thomas Reardon

Thomas Reardon is an American software engineer, entrepreneur and neuroscientist who started the Internet Explorer project at Microsoft and later co-founded CTRL-labs, a New York company that built a wrist-worn electromyography (EMG) controller. After Facebook agreed to buy CTRL-labs in September 2019, Reardon led Facebook's neuromotor interface work inside Facebook Reality Labs (later Reality Labs at Meta Platforms), the research that led to the Meta Neural Band, the EMG wristband sold with Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses since 30 September 2025.

As head of CTRL-labs, Reardon argued that virtual reality and augmented reality lacked a good way for users to give input, telling TechCrunch in 2018 that "no immersive computing technology so far has won." He and Patrick Kaifosh, credited as equal contributors, head the byline of a 2025 Nature paper, published with the group "CTRL-labs at Reality Labs", that describes a surface electromyography wristband whose generic decoding models generalize across people out of the box. MIXED, citing The Information, reported in April 2024 that he would leave Meta that May and remain an adviser. He joined Lux Capital as a venture partner in December 2024 and later co-founded Flourish, an artificial intelligence company that studies the brain to design more energy-efficient AI models.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked every career, education, publication and quoted claim against the Columbia GS 2012 release and MIT Technology Review TR35 profile (archive.org), TechCrunch 2018 and 2019, RCR Wireless 2000 and 2002, Tech Monitor/CBR 2001, VentureBeat, Meta newsroom and blog posts, UploadVR, MIXED, The Register, Lux Capital, The Next Web, SiliconANGLE, and PubMed/Crossref records for the four papers. About review dates.

Early life

Reardon was born in New Hampshire into a working-class Irish-Catholic family and is one of 18 children. Columbia University's School of General Studies described him in 2012 as a "math and computer prodigy" who took graduate-level courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before finishing high school. After high school he moved to North Carolina and started his first software company. Speaking to TechCrunch in 2018, he said he started a company at 19 and joined Microsoft in 1990; in the Columbia release he said a connection to Bill Gates started his Microsoft career.

Career

Microsoft and Internet Explorer

In MIT Technology Review's 2003 account, Microsoft's original Internet Explorer development team "consisted of one person": Reardon. He moved from programmer to program manager as the web grew, choosing which new technologies and emerging standards Microsoft would adopt. The magazine wrote that his work culminated in Internet Explorer 3.0, the first Microsoft browser able to compete with Netscape Navigator, and that he then spent four years working with standards bodies, moving Microsoft away from proprietary technologies and toward open standards. The Columbia release says he conceived the browser at 24 while working on Windows 95, created the project, and was its architect through its worldwide adoption in the late 1990s.

Reardon was a founding board member of, and technical adviser to, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where the Columbia release says he was instrumental in the development and implementation of HTML4, CSS and XML. As of 2012 he held six U.S. patents. TechCrunch wrote that he later led Microsoft's internet architecture effort, which covered CSS and XML. The Next Web credits him with delivering the first implementation of CSS in a web browser. He spent about nine to ten years at the company: the Columbia release quotes him describing a "nine-year career with Microsoft", while TechCrunch reported about ten.

Avogadro and Openwave

In October 2000 RCR Wireless News reported the launch of Avogadro, a startup backed by the investment firm Ignition that aimed to combine business-to-business, mobility and Internet technologies in a new service. It was led by "Tom Reardon, a former Microsoft Corp. executive involved in forming Microsoft's Explorer and MSN products." In May 2001 Openwave Systems signed a definitive agreement to acquire Avogadro, which was developing an instant messaging product for communication service providers. Avogadro's shareholders and option holders were to receive about 2.7 million Openwave shares, and its 40 employees were to join Openwave.

At Openwave, a supplier of mobile phone software, Reardon was named co-chief technology officer with Bruce Martin in August 2002. MIT Technology Review included him, then aged 34 and a general manager at Openwave in Redwood City, California, in its 2003 list of innovators under 35. In that profile he said: "We're trying to kill this mentality that smart phones are just PCs ported to cell phones." The Columbia release says he led development of the first mobile-device web browsers at Openwave.

Classics and neuroscience

Reardon told TechCrunch that he left the technology industry in 2003 and went back to school to study Greek and Latin. In the Columbia release he credited an unplanned lunch with the physicist Freeman Dyson, saying the conversation "pushed me to stretch a six-month sabbatical in 2004 into four years of a liberal arts education at Columbia GS." He graduated from Columbia's School of General Studies magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2008, completed a Master of Science in neuroscience at Duke University in 2010, and returned to Columbia that year to do research with the neuroscientist Thomas Jessell while pursuing a doctorate in neurobiology. The release announced him as the speaker at the School of General Studies Class of 2012 graduation on 13 May 2012. TechCrunch described his PhD work as split between Duke and Columbia.

At Columbia he co-authored hippocampus studies with Attila Losonczy and Patrick Kaifosh, his later CTRL-labs co-founder, including a 2013 Nature Neuroscience paper on septo-hippocampal signaling in awake mice and a 2014 Science paper on dendritic inhibition and fear learning. As first author, with co-authors including Jessell and Losonczy, he published a 2016 Neuron paper introducing CVS-N2cΔG, a glycoprotein-deleted rabies virus strain for tracing connections between neurons. Compared with the commonly used SAD-B19ΔG strain, it was less toxic to neurons and transferred across synapses more efficiently, which the authors concluded made it a more effective means of mapping neuronal circuits and of monitoring and manipulating neuronal activity in living animals. Lux Capital describes him as a neuroscientist with a PhD.

CTRL-labs

Reardon co-founded CTRL-labs in New York with Patrick Kaifosh, the company's chief scientist, and Tim Machado, and was its CEO. VentureBeat gives 2015 as the founding year. TechCrunch described its product as an electromyography-based armband that reads nerve signals traveling from the brain to the fingers and translates them into intended actions. By November 2018 it had 42 employees, about half of them PhD scientists.

Reardon pitched the technology as an answer to the input problem of immersive computing. In the 2018 TechCrunch interview he said that virtual, augmented and mixed reality had "done nothing so far to change human output" and that "you can't have a successful immersive computing platform without solving the human output problem".

Facebook announced on 23 September 2019 that it would acquire CTRL-labs and place it in Facebook Reality Labs. Facebook did not disclose the price; TechCrunch reported Bloomberg's estimate of US$500 million to US$1 billion. Reardon was to join Facebook, and CTRL-labs employees could choose to do the same. Interviewed by VentureBeat after speaking at Web Summit in Lisbon in November 2019, before the deal had closed, Reardon said wrist-based neural input had "huge value in what I'll call the emerging platforms" and, asked whether consumer neural interfaces were five years away, answered "I think it's sooner than five."

Facebook Reality Labs and Meta

A March 2021 Facebook post on wrist-based input for AR glasses identified Reardon as Director of Neuromotor Interfaces at Facebook Reality Labs. He described the approach as using "the nerves outside the brain that animate your hand and finger muscles", saying: "What we're trying to do with neural interfaces is to let you control the machine directly." UploadVR wrote in February 2024 that he had led the wristband project within Meta since the acquisition. Lux Capital gives his later title as VP and Head of Neuromotor Interfaces and Input and Interactions for Reality Labs.

In April 2024 MIXED reported, citing an internal post obtained by The Information, that Reardon would leave Meta in May 2024 and continue as an adviser, staying in contact with chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth and AR vice president Alex Himel.

The Nature paper on the wristband was published online on 23 July 2025 under the names of Kaifosh, Reardon and "CTRL-labs at Reality Labs". It describes gesture recognition and handwriting decoders trained on data from thousands of participants that generalize to new users without per-user training data. Test users reached a median of 0.66 target acquisitions per second in a navigation task, 0.88 gesture detections per second in a discrete-gesture task and 20.9 words per minute of handwriting, and personalizing the handwriting model improved its performance by 16%. The Register described Reardon at the time of publication as a research vice president who had co-led the team with Kaifosh. Meta's blog post on the paper said it had prototyped an sEMG wristband with Orion, its augmented reality glasses prototype.

Meta announced the Meta Neural Band on 17 September 2025 and bundled it with Meta Ray-Ban Display, starting at US$799 for the glasses and band, with US sales from 30 September 2025. SiliconANGLE wrote that CTRL-labs' technology underpins the band, and The Next Web described Reardon as having led the Neural Band program within Reality Labs.

Lux Capital and Flourish

Lux Capital, which counts CTRL-labs as a portfolio company, announced on 18 December 2024 that Reardon had joined it as a venture partner, and said he advised its portfolio companies Osmo and EvolutionaryScale. He co-founded Flourish with former Amazon executive Rob Williams. In June 2026 SiliconANGLE, citing Wired, reported that the company had raised US$500 million at a US$2.5 billion valuation, with Jeff Bezos providing about a fifth of the money and GV, Lux Capital and Catalio the rest. Flourish is building its own neuroscience laboratory to study cortical columns and aims to build AI models that use far less power than current large language models. The Next Web reported in May 2026 that the company had no commercial product.

Selected publications

Year	Title	Venue
2013	"Septo-hippocampal GABAergic signaling across multiple modalities in awake mice" (Kaifosh et al.)	Nature Neuroscience, vol. 16, no. 9
2014	"Dendritic inhibition in the hippocampus supports fear learning" (Lovett-Barron et al.)	Science, vol. 343, no. 6173
2016	"Rabies virus CVS-N2cΔG strain enhances retrograde synaptic transfer and neuronal viability" (first author)	Neuron, vol. 89, no. 4
2025	"A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction" (with Patrick Kaifosh and CTRL-labs at Reality Labs)	Nature, vol. 645, no. 8081

See also

• CTRL-labs
• Meta Neural Band
• Patrick Kaifosh
• Electromyography
• Brain-computer interface