Neuralink Raises $650M As Brain Chip Rivals Paradromics And Starfish Challenge

Brain chip or brain-computer interface (BCI) company Neuralink successfully implanted a chip in its first patient in January 2024.

For the most part, this chip worked well, allowing the patient—Noland Arbaugh, a quadriplegic man—to control a computer mouse using his thoughts.

However, it also came with a few snags, which included some of the device’s threads retracting from the brain, resulting in a net decrease in the number of effective electrodes. The team responded to the setback by modifying the recording algorithm to be more sensitive to neural population signals and other moves.

Neuralink went on to implant its chips into four more patients with severe paralysis, bringing its grand total to five patients. Its ambitions show no signs of slowing down, as the company’s co-founder, Elon Musk, expects to (hopefully) reach 20 or 30 patients by the end of 2025.

To help it achieve this dream, the company also revealed it enjoyed a successful funding round.
 

Neuralink Raises $650 Million

Through a blog post published on its website, Neuralink announced it raised $650 million in a Series E funding round.

The round witnessed participation from key investors such as ARK Invest, DFJ Growth, Founders Fund, G42, Human Capital, Lightspeed, QIA, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, amongst others.

The funding will help the company expand patient access and innovate future devices, hire more engineers and operators across disciplines, as well as “bring our technology to more people—restoring independence for those with unmet medical needs and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with brain interfaces.”

In addition to the growing list of implanted patients, the company launched clinical trials at leading institutions for neurosurgical care spanning three countries and two continents. This includes Barrow Neurological Institute (Phoenix, Arizona), The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis at the University of Miami, University Health Network (Toronto Western Hospital), and Cleveland Clinic (Abu Dhabi).


The company is also looking in the direction of new applications and use cases beyond digital device control. This comes courtesy of the CONVOY trial—which aims to use the chips to control an assistive robotic arm—and securing FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for both innovative vision and speech restoration programs.

Furthermore, Neuralink is progressing towards a whole-brain interface. This includes expanding the number of neurons and brain regions that its device interfaces with, enabling more capabilities.

At the same time, Neuralink isn’t the only company engaged in the BCI market, and its rivals are catching up to it.
 

Paradromics Completes First Human Implant

On June 2, 2025, Paradromics announced that it had implanted its Connexus BCI device in a human for the first time.

Paradromics is a neurotechnology company that develops the highest data-rate brain-computer interface platform.

The surgery was led by Matthew Willsey (MD, PhD), a neurosurgeon and biomedical engineer with the University of Michigan, along with senior epilepsy surgeon Oren Sagher (MD) and a multidisciplinary team of clinicians and engineers.

The successful completion of the procedure demonstrates not only that Connexus can be used in humans but can also be safely implanted, record electrical brain signals, and be removed intact in less than 20 minutes. As such, the Paradromics BCI platform can record neural activity at the level of individual neurons and uses artificial intelligence to translate brain signals into actionable outputs.

It also helps the company advance research into the broad potential for intracortical BCIs in brain therapeutics.

“This surgery is a key inflection point for Paradromics. We are now a clinical-stage company,” said Matt Angle (PhD), CEO and Founder of Paradromics. “We’ve known for some time, based on our preclinical studies, that we have developed a world-class BCI platform. Now with the jump to human surgeries and recordings, we are closer to translating this neurotechnology to patients.”

As per the company, this procedure is the first of many surgeries planned over the next several months.


Over the past few months, Paradromics has made a series of announcements that have enhanced its ambitions.

This includes the appointment of Dr. Stephen Ryu as Chief Medical Officer (CMO). Dr. Ryu, a board-certified neurosurgeon, is the Chair of Neurosurgery at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and has co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed BCI publications.

Prior to this, the company also announced a successful funding round, courtesy of NEOM, the sustainable region taking shape in northwest Saudi Arabia.
 

Starfish’s First Brain Chip

Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell has long been a fan of BCI devices for gaming.

For reference, Valve is the company behind video games such as Half-Life, DOTA 2, and Counter-Strike, as well as the PC gaming platform Steam.

This idea birthed Starfish Neuroscience, a new BCI company with the aim of developing minimally invasive solutions for interfacing with the brain and body, spanning the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders, improved non-invasive TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) instrumentation, and precision thermal modulation for oncology.

Now, the company is preparing to launch its first custom brain chip for miniaturized ultra-low power electrophysiology.

Essentially, the company is looking to build a new class of minimally invasive, distributed neural interfaces that reduce implant size—one that comes with minimizing the physical size and removing the battery and reducing power requirements by enabling the device to run via wireless power transmission.

This is why the company designed its own custom electrophysiology chip, in partnership with Imec. The chip’s design is focused on minimal size and low power and is built with the intent of future integration into a fully wireless, battery-free implant. 

Some of its features include:
 

• Low power: 1.1 mW total power consumption during normal recording

• Physically small: 2 x 4mm (0.3mm pitch BGA)

• Capable of both recording (spikes and LFP) & stimulation (biphasic pulses)

• 32 electrode sites, 16 simultaneous recording channels at 18.75 kHz

• 1 current source for stimulating on arbitrary pairs of electrodes

• Onboard impedance monitoring and stim voltage transient measurement

• Digital onboard data processing and spike detection allows the device to operate via low-bandwidth wireless interfaces.

• Fabricated in TSMC 55nm process

As such, the company expects its first chips to be developed by late 2025 and is looking for collaborators who could help find new and exciting avenues.


Do you think Neuralink’s rivals can challenge its reign, or will the leader’s new funding help it capture a commanding market position?

Let us know in the comments below!