Updated June 2026 · Originally November 2020 · 12 min read
Would you like a brain-computer interface (BCI)? Let’s explore.
“People will not use devices to communicate with machines in the future. You will use your mind and it will be direct.” — Thomas Reardon, CTRL-Labs (acquired by Meta Reality Labs)
In 2014, NeuroPace (Nasdaq: NPCE) became the first company to win FDA approval for a brainwave-based treatment for adults with drug-resistant focal epilepsy. Its Responsive Neurostimulation (RNS) System implants in the brain, recognizes each patient’s unique seizure patterns, and automatically intervenes before seizures start.
Three years later, quadriplegic racer Rodrigo Hübner Mendes became the first person to drive an F1 car using only his brainwaves, thanks to an Emotiv headset.
A 2019 Kickstarter campaign introduced UDrone — a $297 drone controllable by thought alone.
Synchron then implanted its Stentrode BCI in two patients with ALS in 2020, enabling them to text, email, shop, and bank online through direct thought. Since then, BCIs have moved from curiosity to clinical reality — and the race to bring them to market has intensified dramatically. We’ll cover where each major company stands.
“The signals you generate neurologically are the most unique identifier of you. With 30 seconds of recordings, we can identify that person for the rest of their life.” — Thomas Reardon
Examining, measuring and optimizing your brain
Standard medical imaging technologies such as functional neuroimaging and electroencephalography (EEG) recordings remain the workhorses of brain research. Over 15 companies — including Neuroelectrics — sell medical-grade EEG devices to analyze and potentially optimize brain function.
However, BCI expert Thomas Oxley compares EEG to looking for surface ripples made by a fish swimming underwater while a storm roils the lake. Emerging alternatives offer sharper windows into the brain:
- Magnetoencephalography (MEG), which measures magnetic waves from neurons firing beneath the skull without touching it
- Near-infrared and infrared light, inferring brain activity from changes in blood flow
- Ultrasonics — still mostly research-stage, but advancing toward clinical use
We’ll write more on analyzing your brain in an upcoming Setting Your Health Baseline article. Until then, here’s where the leading BCI companies stand today.
What’s new since our last update
The BCI field has moved faster since 2020 than in the preceding decade. Three developments stand out before we get to the full company rundown.
Key developments since 2020:
Neuralink implanted its first humans — and has now reached 26 patients.
The PRIME Study began in January 2024 with first patient Noland Arbaugh, who demonstrated computer control through thought alone within weeks. As of June 2026, Neuralink has implanted 26 patients across trials in the US, UK, Canada, UAE, and Germany — and is accelerating toward high-volume production and near-fully automated surgery. The device has not yet received full FDA Premarket Approval (PMA); it remains in investigational trials.
Precision Neuroscience received the first FDA clearance for a next-generation wireless BCI.
In March 2025, its Layer 7-T Cortical Interface — a flexible film with 1,024 electrodes thinner than a human hair — received 510(k) clearance for up to 30-day implantation. Not a permanent consumer device; a research and surgical mapping tool to accumulate neural training data. The clearance is nonetheless a first: no other next-generation BCI company had cleared that bar before it.
Synchron raised $200 million to fund a 2026 pivotal trial aimed at first FDA approval of a permanent BCI.
After completing its COMMAND feasibility study in six patients with zero neurological safety events, Synchron now targets its pivotal trial in 2026 — the study it needs before filing the first-ever PMA for a permanently implanted BCI. If that succeeds, Synchron would be the first company a doctor could prescribe a BCI from commercially.
Top brain-computer interface companies
In 2017, Gartner researchers placed BCIs on their Emerging Technology Hype Cycle more than ten years from reality. Much has happened faster than expected. Brain-speech recognition can now predict 97% of what a person says by reading their brain signals alone.
MIT Media Lab — Arnav Kapur, Shreyas Kapur, Pattie Maes
Created by Arnav Kapur, Shreyas Kapur, and Pattie Maes, AlterEgo reads peripheral neural signals when you internally articulate words — without opening your mouth or making any observable movement. Responses come through bone conduction audio, keeping the interface entirely private. The result: a closed-loop human-computer dialogue conducted entirely through inner monologue. This is now possible — your inner monologue becomes inner dialogue.
Acquired by Meta Reality Labs
CTRL-Labs’ wristband captures all neural signals traveling from the brain to the hand, digitizing hand movements without requiring the user to touch anything. Meta’s 2024 MetaQuest controllers now use AI to estimate hand position in 3D space, extending this approach into mixed-reality environments. The long-term goal: eliminate mice, keyboards, and touchscreens entirely.
Next-generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology Program
$104 million in funding to develop mind-reading capabilities for military applications, including controlling drone fleets at the speed of thought. Researchers on the program have also developed cyborg insects remotely directed by human neural signals.
EEG headsets and earbuds · Commercially available · Headsets $999–$1,999 · Earbuds from $399
Emotiv’s Brainwear® product line monitors, analyzes, visualizes, and surfaces brain data and stress levels in real time. Emotiv Labs Brain Games let users test memory, focus, and impulse control.
UPenn spinout · $40M in funding
Innervace engineers living electrodes that merge with and connect to brain tissue. Rather than replacing lost brain cells, the goal is replacing lost circuitry — a more ambitious and potentially more durable approach to restoring impaired brain function.
Non-invasive brain imaging · Founded by Bryan Johnson · $64M personal investment
Kernel’s Flow device combines time-domain functional near-infrared spectroscopy (TD-fNIRS) with advanced algorithms to produce cortical brain activity maps from a wearable helmet — no surgery, no implant. Bryan Johnson stepped back from the CEO role in 2023 to focus on clinical applications.
Key developments since the original article:
- A 2025 study in npj Dementia found that a 15-minute Kernel Flow brain scan can identify mild cognitive impairment at accuracy approaching blood tests — surpassing standard clinical cognitive tests
- Research published in Scientific Reports in 2024 validated the Flow2 system’s test-retest consistency across cognitive tasks, confirming reliability for longitudinal research
- Kernel now targets early dementia detection and major depressive disorder treatment decision support, and in November 2025 presented research at the American Psychiatric Association meeting on using Flow to guide treatment selection for depression
The device remains a research and clinical tool, not a consumer product. Kernel’s commercial strategy targets clinics and research institutions rather than direct-to-consumer sale.
Wetware AI · “Koniku” means immortal in Yoruba
Koniku embeds actual brain cells on a chip, creating biological computing hardware. Current applications focus on “smell cyborgs” — devices that detect airborne chemicals, including explosives and cancer markers, with sensitivity exceeding a trained dog’s nose.
MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering
Led by Edward Boyden · 24+ researchers
Research led by Edward Boyden — a pioneer of optogenetics, the technique for controlling neurons with light — explores ways to fire different neurons at different brain depths using electrical frequencies. This center fields over two dozen researchers working on reverse-engineering the brain.
Consumer EEG headband · $300–$450/year subscription
Muse’s EEG headband senses and displays attention levels between active and calm states, measuring stress and supporting both sleep improvement and guided meditation. A thoughtful independent review from USA Today’s Reviewed covers the device’s strengths and weaknesses in detail. The meditation benefits Keep.Health covers elsewhere provide useful context for evaluating whether this kind of biofeedback accelerates a practice.
Elon Musk · 26 patients implanted globally as of June 2026 · Not FDA-approved for commercial use
Neuralink’s N1 implant — roughly the size of a quarter (23mm diameter) — sits flush with the skull and uses up to 3,072 electrodes on ultra-thin threads to read motor cortex signals, translating imagined movement into computer control. A robotic surgical system (R1) places the threads with precision no human surgeon can match.
Major developments since our original article:
- January 2024: First human implant (Noland Arbaugh), demonstrating cursor control, chess, and web browsing through thought
- April 2025: FDA issued a limited Emergency Use Authorization for Neuralink’s adaptive neural decoder software in hospitalized locked-in patients with stroke or traumatic brain injury — the first time any Neuralink technology received FDA permission outside a formal trial
- 2025: Breakthrough Device Designation arrived for both the speech restoration technology (VOICE trial) and Blindsight, a vision-restoration project for blind patients
- May 2025: Neuralink integrated xAI’s Grok language model into its signal pipeline — using AI to fill gaps in neural decoding and reduce word error rates to under 10% in closed-vocabulary tests
- June 2026: 26 patients implanted across trials in US, UK, Canada, UAE, and Germany
- 2026 roadmap: High-volume production begins; surgical procedure moves toward near-full automation; second-generation device addresses the electrode thread retraction issue identified in early patients
Neuralink has not received full FDA Premarket Approval (PMA) and remains in investigational trials. No consumer version exists, and the company has stated no consumer EEG or wearable BCI product is on its roadmap. For anyone with ALS, spinal cord injury, or locked-in syndrome, Neuralink’s patient registry accepts applications for upcoming trials.
Consumer EEG for gaming · $130 · 1M+ sold
Consumer-grade EEG headsets ($130) that let users play games with their minds and track attention, meditation, sleep, and stress. Over a million sold. That said, most reviewers report the technology as dated and poorly supported.
Led by Mary Lou Jepsen · $55M+ raised · Products $100–$10K
OpenWater raised over $55 million to build a Silicon Hospital platform — a for-profit open-source infrastructure where conditions can be detected digitally using a combination of near-infrared, MRI-grade imaging, and ultrasonics. The long-term vision: reduce the cost of developing treatments by a factor of 1,000, and bring diagnostic power that now costs thousands of dollars down to a price anyone can afford. Products (not yet FDA-approved; $100–$10K depending on quantity) include Open Motion 3.0 for measuring blood flow and oxygenation deep in tissue, and Open LIFU 2.0 for low-intensity focused ultrasound therapy.
Austin, Texas · $33M raised · FDA Breakthrough Device Designation
Led by Matt Angle, Paradromics raised $33 million in 2023 and received FDA Breakthrough Medical Device Designation. Its high-bandwidth BCI monitors 1,600 intracortical data channels simultaneously — more than any competing architecture — targeting people with physical disabilities.
New York · FDA 510(k) cleared March 2025 · 37 patients to date
Founded by Benjamin Rapoport — one of Neuralink’s original co-founders — Precision takes a minimally invasive approach: instead of penetrating needle-like threads into brain tissue, its Layer 7-T Cortical Interface lays a flexible film across the brain’s surface through a micro-slit smaller than 1mm.
- March 2025: FDA 510(k) clearance (K242618) for the Layer 7-T — the first next-generation wireless BCI developer to receive FDA clearance, ahead of both Neuralink and Synchron on that specific milestone
- The device packs 1,024 electrodes onto a film roughly the size of a postage stamp, one-fifth the thickness of a human hair, recording up to 2 billion data points per minute
- Clearance covers up to 30-day implantation for intraoperative brain mapping; permanent BCI use will require a separate IDE trial and PMA filing
- By October 2025, Precision had implanted 37 clinical study patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, West Virginia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Mount Sinai
Endovascular BCI · $200M Series D · 2026 pivotal trial · Backed by Bezos Expeditions, Qatar Investment Authority
Synchron’s Stentrode reaches the brain through a blood vessel — threaded via the jugular vein to the motor cortex, where it deploys like a stent. No open-skull surgery required. This approach trades electrode resolution for safety and scalability.
- 2024: COMMAND feasibility study in six patients completed with zero neurological adverse events over 12 months — the first FDA IDE-approved permanent BCI to meet its primary safety endpoint. Patients controlled computers, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Vision Pro through thought
- November 2025: Synchron raised $200 million in Series D funding to execute its 2026 pivotal trial, which — if successful — would support the first PMA filing for a permanently implanted BCI
- 2026: Pivotal trial begins; Synchron targets being the first BCI a physician can commercially prescribe
Digitally preserving your brain
With BCIs advancing rapidly, will digital preservation of memories and cognition eventually follow? One famous early attempt: Martine Rothblatt created Bina48 — a robotic head running an AI trained on hours of conversations with their partner. See Bina48 meet Siri for a sense of where that technology stood.
Here are other organizations working on brain preservation, some more plausible than others:
- 2045 Initiative — Focused on brain uploading to achieve human immortality. No public updates since 2016.
- Nectome — Won scientific prizes for animal brain preservation using aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. Lost the support of the scientific community after promoting a “mind-uploading service that is 100% fatal” — preserving the brain requires killing the patient first. Raised $2 million in grants and Silicon Valley seed funding. Sought to preserve the first human brains in 2023. Appears to be out of business as of 2024. The technology to retrieve memories from a preserved brain has not been invented and faces fundamental unsolved problems.
- Cyran AI — Founder Manan Suri uses nanoscale physics to mimic the brain. Conventional transistors store information as 1s and 0s; biological synapses take multiple states. Emerging non-volatile memory (eNVM) is a potential path toward hardware that thinks more like tissue does.
- Scientists transferred memories between snails — a proof of concept for memory as transferable information, not just a brain state.
- Will machines ever become conscious? — the question is no longer purely philosophical.
In summary: digital preservation and uploading remain a long way off. The BCI companies described above are making genuine progress on reading and writing signals to the living brain — but nothing remotely like consciousness transfer is on any credible near-term roadmap.
What this means for your health and longevity
The practical near-term relevance of BCI technology runs through three channels.
Brain health monitoring. Non-invasive devices like Kernel Flow, Muse, and Emotiv offer varying degrees of access to your own brain state. Kernel’s work on early dementia detection through brief brain scans is particularly relevant: if a 15-minute scan can approach blood-test accuracy for mild cognitive impairment, that becomes a meaningful tool for the health baseline Keep.Health’s audience cares about. Still research-stage — not available at your PCP’s office yet — but worth watching closely.
Restorative applications for serious conditions. For anyone with ALS, spinal cord injury, stroke, or severe speech impairment, the clinical BCI trials now underway at Neuralink, Synchron, and Precision represent the most significant rehabilitation technology developments in decades. None of these devices are commercially available yet — but Synchron’s 2026 pivotal trial could change that.
Brain stimulation for mental health. Non-invasive brain stimulation via Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) already sits at the clinical-mainstream crossover point — FDA-cleared, Medicare-covered, and delivering 50–60% response rates in treatment-resistant depression. For more on how exercise, sleep, meditation, and TMS fit together for brain health, see Outthink Your Brain.
The brain-computer interface field connects closely to Keep.Health’s coverage of exoskeletons, bionics and prosthetics — full integration between neural interfaces and physical augmentation devices is the longer-term goal that both fields are working toward. It also connects to our work on cellular reprogramming and reversing aging — the brain is, arguably, the organ most worth protecting and the one we understand least.
As your reward for continuing to focus on your health, read Richard Morgan’s brilliant novel and Netflix series Altered Carbon — set in a future where consciousness transfers between bodies. After reading or watching it, your brain will never think about things quite the same way.
