Overview

Arbor Neuroscience is the name Forest Neurotech took in September 2026. It is a nonprofit focused research organisation within Convergent Research. Sumner Norman, Tyson Aflalo and Will Biederman founded Forest in 2023 to develop functional ultrasound imaging, which tracks brain activity through changes in blood flow, as a way to read and modulate the brain without electrodes. In October 2023 Forest signed a five-year co-development agreement with Butterfly Network, worth $20 million to Butterfly, for its Ultrasound-on-Chip technology, and in March 2024 it received a $14 million commitment channelled through Convergent Research.

Leadership and thesis

Philip Sabes, a Neuralink co-founder who worked there full-time from 2017 to 2020 and is professor emeritus at UCSF, became chief executive with the rename. Whitney Griggs joined the leadership. In a keynote in Shanghai on 14 September 2026, Sabes argued that the bottleneck in neuromodulation is prediction: clinicians cannot reliably predict how a patient will respond to brain stimulation. He described current practice as “poke and hope” and positioned Arbor’s approach as “predict and treat”.

The founder network

Forest’s founders have gone on to build companies on the same ultrasound approach. Norman and Aflalo co-founded Merge Labs, the OpenAI-backed company that launched in January 2026 with a $252 million seed round. Biederman founded Bridge Neurotech, which came out of stealth in October 2026 with $13.5 million. Both companies have licensed Butterfly’s chips, as Forest did.

Why it matters

Arbor has no product and has not disclosed its current funding or pipeline milestones. Its weight in the field comes from its people and platform: the Forest group produced two venture-backed ultrasound brain-computer interface companies, and its founders account for three of Butterfly’s brain-computer interface deals. Its first functional ultrasound results will test the predict-and-treat thesis.

Coverage on InsideBCI

• 19 September 2026: Arbor Neuroscience CEO Philip Sabes tells Shanghai BCI symposium that prediction is the neuromodulation bottleneck
• 8 October 2026: Bridge Neurotech raises $13.5 million to build a brain-computer interface without surgery
• 28 June 2026: Aleph Neuro reports what it says is the first 3D ultrasound localization microscopy image of a living human brain through an intact skull
• 28 March 2026: Merge Labs’ $252M Bet on Ultrasound BCI Faces Scientific Scrutiny