Government Strategy Is Shaping the Global Brain-Computer Interface Race
Three events converged this year to turn brain-computer interfaces from a research curiosity into a subject of government strategy. China moved a product to market, having already built the machinery to pay for it. The U.S. funded a founder. The European Union asked its regulators to study a problem. This is not an accident of timing. It reflects fundamentally different beliefs about what a government should do when a new technology can read, and may soon write to, the human brain.
Funding Outlook for Neurotech Startups Moves to Extremes
Money in medical neurotechnology is pulling toward two poles at once, and the middle appears to be thinning. At one end, a small cluster of platform companies is absorbing financing at a scale the field has never seen. At the other, private capital is moving downstream into the clinics that deliver treatment. What sits between those poles, the broad tail of device companies still building toward first-in-human and clearance, is being asked to get creative or survive while nondilutive funding is harder to predict.