Founder of Dargentic Intelligence and author of NEURAL: How Brain-Computer Interfaces Will Redefine Commerce and Power (Fast Company Press, 2027).
Velco Dar is the founder of Dargentic Intelligence and the author of NEURAL: How Brain-Computer Interfaces Will Redefine Commerce and Power, to be published by Fast Company Press in 2027. He publishes and edits InsideBCI, a daily publication on the brain-computer interface industry, and reviews every article before it is published. He writes and speaks on the commercial, strategic and governance implications of neurotechnology for business leaders, investors and policymakers.
NEURAL is a book on the commercial and societal future of brain-computer interfaces. It draws on interviews with BCI founders, researchers, ethicists and artists, and argues that neural technology will shift value from attention to intent, making trust and neurorights competitive advantages.
Velco Dar writes the bi-annual Dargentic Intelligence Report. The latest, Issue 02, Brain-Computer Interfaces: The Infrastructure Race (Fall 2026, published 31 October 2026), sets out how brain-computer interfaces are being priced, coded and regulated ahead of the sales, and grades the theses of Issue 01. The previous issue, Issue 01, Brain-Computer Interfaces, The Takeoff Era (Spring 2026), assessed what the first commercial approval of a brain-computer interface means for commerce, governance and competitive position.
The four regulatory postures for brain-computer interfaces: Rights-First (Chile), Horizontal Regulator (European Union), State-Patchwork (United States) and Industrial Builder (China and South Korea). InsideBCI uses the framework to place regulatory news.
Velco Dar is the founder of Dargentic Intelligence and the author of NEURAL: How Brain-Computer Interfaces Will Redefine Commerce and Power (Fast Company Press, 2027). He publishes and edits InsideBCI, a daily publication on the brain-computer interface industry, and writes and speaks on the commercial, strategic and governance implications of neurotechnology.
NEURAL: How Brain-Computer Interfaces Will Redefine Commerce and Power is Velco Dar's book on the commercial and societal future of brain-computer interfaces, to be published by Fast Company Press in 2027. It draws on interviews with BCI founders, researchers, ethicists and artists.
The Dargentic Intelligence Report is a bi-annual research report on the brain-computer interface industry, written by Velco Dar. The latest, Issue 02, Brain-Computer Interfaces: The Infrastructure Race (Fall 2026, published 31 October 2026), sets out how brain-computer interfaces are being priced, coded and regulated ahead of the sales, and grades the theses of Issue 01. Issue 01, Brain-Computer Interfaces, The Takeoff Era (Spring 2026), assessed what the first commercial approval of a brain-computer interface means for commerce, governance and competitive position.
A framework Velco Dar set out in Issue 01 of the Dargentic Intelligence Report. It groups national approaches into four postures: Rights-First (Chile), Horizontal Regulator (the European Union, through the AI Act and GDPR), State-Patchwork (the United States) and Industrial Builder (China and South Korea).
The Week (India) published a long-form Q&A with Velco Dar on 23 April 2026, and he was a featured source in the cover story of The Week's Health supplement (10 May 2026 issue), alongside Noland Arbaugh, Phil Kennedy and José del R. Millán. Time Out Bangkok featured his October 2025 talk on brain-computer interfaces.
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.
Oman Investment Authority's Neuralink position is the latest entry in a sovereign-capital and tech-billionaire cohort racing into brain-computer interfaces.
In just nine months China has issued a national BCI blueprint, overtaken the United States in BCI patent filings, funnelled hundreds of millions into startups, and has just granted the world's first commercial implant approval.
255 InsideBCI articles edited by Velco Dar. The ten most recent:
Issue 02 of the Dargentic Intelligence Report, Brain-Computer Interfaces: The Infrastructure Race, published on 31 October 2026, finds that payment codes, developer tools, brain-data models and privacy law arrived in the six months to 30 September ahead of meaningful implant sales. The first disclosed sales record is 13 sets, at Neuracle.
Neuralink said on 29 October 2026 that its engineers spent 72 hours at the home of a participant in its VOICE speech trial and prototyped features including iPhone call integration, an iOS keyboard for brain-based dictation, lock-screen controls, automatic detection of attempted speech and a Grok agent triggered by thought. A Texas filing registered on 28 October shows Neuralink plans a $2.7 million vivarium at its Austin-area site.
China Central Television reported on 29 and 30 October 2026 that, in a study by the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Kunming Medical University, 13 of 24 patients with chronic disorders of consciousness showed clear improvement after non-invasive ultrasound stimulation. Chinese media call the device a brain-computer interface, and the reports describe only stimulation. InsideBCI found no published paper on the study and no registration for it on ClinicalTrials.gov.
Precision Neuroscience signed a two-year memorandum of understanding with Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi on 21 October 2026, with the support of the Department of Health Abu Dhabi, to evaluate its Layer 7 cortical interface in collaborative clinical research. It is the company's first clinical research site outside the United States. The same hospital hosts Neuralink's UAE-PRIME trial, and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Capital took part in Precision's $250 million Series D.
Shanghai brain-computer interface company NeuroXess announced a RMB 700 million Series B round on 28 October 2026, co-led by SDIC Juli, Shenzhen Capital Group and Qinzhi Capital and described by 36Kr as dominated overall by state capital. The money will fund the multicentre registration trial of its implant for people with quadriplegia, a factory in Jiangxi and next-generation products.
Neuralink said on 28 October 2026 that one participant with ALS in its VOICE speech trial reached 75 words per minute with a 5.8 per cent word error rate on a 125,000-word vocabulary in their first week. The figures come from a company post and have not been peer-reviewed. They are faster than any published result on a vocabulary that size, and less accurate than the best published results from UC Davis.
Beijing-based eSonic launched what it calls the eSonic brain-computer interface platform on 22 October 2026 and signed a Sino-French strategic cooperation with researchers from Mickael Tanter's team, whose Paris lab introduced functional ultrasound imaging of the brain in 2011. The company's only public account is its own press release. No French institution is named as a party, and eSonic cites no published data showing functional ultrasound through an intact adult human skull.
Defence start-up NeuroDoctrine, led by neuroscientist Zied Tayeb, flew three small commercial drones with a non-invasive headband reading brain signals over the visual cortex at its Manchester launch in late September 2026. Calibration takes about six hours per user. The company, whose advisers include a former US Special Operations Command science and technology director and a former commander of NATO Allied Land Command, is raising money and wants to sell its system to defence contractors. It has published no test data behind its performance claims.
China's National Medical Products Administration approved Zhejiang Nurotron's WH-01A auditory brainstem implant on 19 October 2026. Developed with Wu Hao's team at Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, it is approved for children aged 2 to under 6 who lost their hearing before learning to speak and cannot use a cochlear implant because of a severely malformed inner ear or a missing cochlear nerve. In the US, the only approved auditory brainstem implant is limited to patients aged 12 and over with neurofibromatosis type 2.
The US Treasury proposed rules on 22 October 2026 that would prohibit US persons from most new non-public investments in companies that develop or produce brain-computer interfaces and are based in, or owned or controlled from, China, Hong Kong or Macau. The definition covers invasive and non-invasive systems and their software. Brain-computer interfaces sit in the rule's prohibited tier, with no notify-only option, no technical threshold and no small-deal exemption for direct investments. Comments are due by 7 December 2026.