Paradromics announced on 17 June 2026 that University of Michigan surgeons have implanted its Connexus brain-computer interface in a woman with motor neuron disease, the first patient in the FDA-approved Connect-One early feasibility study. She will be followed for six years.
The Korean BCI Association (한국BCI협회) held its inaugural general meeting on Tuesday 16 June 2026 at Centerfield in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Seoul National University Hospital President Baek Nam-jong was elected inaugural chair. Standing vice president is Kim Yong-jin, who chairs the international BCI standardization committee at ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 41. Founding members include Ybrain, Dynamic Solution, Vibatro Robotics, Ceragem on the industry side; Seoul National University Hospital, Severance Hospital and Korea University Anam Hospital on the medical side; and KAIST, DGIST, UNIST, Korea University, Catholic Kwandong University, Yonsei University and Hanyang University on the academic side. The association states it will actively support the K-Moonshot strategic R&D programme that launched in March 2026 with 12 missions, including a BCI mission led by Korea University Professor Cho Il-joo.
WISE S.p.A., an Italian implantable-electrode company working in neuromonitoring, neuromodulation and BCI, closed an oversubscribed €30 million ($34.8M) Series D on 17 June 2026. The lead application is the company's Heron percutaneous spinal cord stimulation lead.
Per China Daily, the city of Tianjin formally inaugurated a dedicated BCI industrial cluster at the 2026 World Intelligence Expo, with 100 million yuan (about $14.8M) annual funding committed, 22 BCI companies already incubated in the zone, and a target of 50 enterprises by 2027.
Casey Harrell, who has ALS, used a UC Davis intracortical speech BCI at home for more than 3,800 hours over 22 months without researchers present. Nature Medicine published the case on 15 June 2026.
Yale's Nature Neuroscience study reports that healthy participants learned to control a video game avatar in under an hour when the fMRI decoder followed each user's individual neural manifold. Off-manifold mappings produced no learning at all.
In June 2026 Bezos's capital crossed into brain-inspired AI (Flourish, close to $100M at $2.5B) and basic neuroscience (Allen Institute family gift, $100M). With Bezos Expeditions in Synchron, no other tech billionaire spans this many neurotech layers.
Flourish, a New York neuro-AI startup founded in 2024 by Thomas Reardon (Internet Explorer architect at Microsoft in 1994 and CTRL-labs co-founder who sold the company to Meta in 2019 for between $500 million and $1 billion) and former Amazon S-team executive Rob Williams, closed a $500 million round at a $2.5 billion valuation around 4 June 2026. Jeff Bezos contributed close to $100 million after nearly doubling an initial $50 million commitment. Other investors include Lux Capital, GV (Alphabet), and Catalio Capital. The company is building Cortex AI, an architecture-layer system that uses connectomics, the cell-by-cell mapping of biological neural connections, to design AI models that target 20-50 watts of energy draw, roughly the power consumption of a laptop and an order of magnitude lower than a server-grade GPU. Flourish has no product yet.
Neuronoff announced on 5 June 2026 that it has implanted the first patient in a US Department of Defense-funded clinical trial of its Injectrode, a helical platinum-iridium peripheral nerve electrode delivered through a single 18-gauge needle under local anaesthesia, in patients with neurogenic bladder dysfunction following spinal cord injury. The trial (NCT07264868) is being run at UT Health Houston under principal investigator Dr Argyrios Stampas, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Research and Innovation in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at McGovern Medical School. It is a Phase 1/2 randomised controlled study enrolling 21 participants across three arms (unilateral active stimulation, bilateral active stimulation, sham), with primary endpoints at 4 and 8 weeks assessing safety, stimulation accuracy, procedural feasibility, and physician and patient acceptability. This is the first-in-human spinal cord injury trial of the Injectrode.
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