Bridge Neurotech
Silicon Valley startup founded in 2026 by Will Biederman to build a wearable brain-computer interface that images brain activity with functional ultrasound through the skull. Came out of stealth on 6 October 2026 with $13.5 million and a licence to Butterfly Network's ultrasound-on-chip technology.
Overview
Bridge Neurotech was founded in 2026 by Will Biederman. The company says the brain-implant chips he designed during his PhD at UC Berkeley became Neuralink’s first chip. He then spent about a decade at Google X and Verily and co-founded Forest Neurotech, now Arbor Neuroscience, with Sumner Norman and Tyson Aflalo, who later co-founded Merge Labs. Advisers include Alexander Huth of UC Berkeley, Gianmarco Pinton of UNC Chapel Hill and North Carolina State, and Stanford neurosurgeon Ashwin Ramayya.
Technology
Bridge uses functional ultrasound imaging, which tracks the changes in blood flow that follow brain activity, and aims to capture the signal from a wearable device and decode it with AI models. The company names two hurdles: the skull scatters sound differently in each person, and decoding has to work in real time across different people.
Latest
Bridge came out of stealth on 6 October 2026 with $13.5 million. It signed a multi-year agreement to license Butterfly Network’s Ultrasound-on-Chip technology through Butterfly Embedded, with payments for technology access and development milestones and commitments to buy Butterfly hardware; the value was not disclosed. Its first study, observational and enrolling in Redwood City, California, compares healthy adults with people whose skulls were repaired with PEEK or Longeviti implants, which let sound through more easily than bone.
Why it matters
Bridge’s deal is the third Butterfly BCI agreement tracing to Forest Neurotech’s founders, after Forest in 2023 and Merge Labs in September 2026, giving Butterfly licence income without building a BCI of its own. Bridge’s round is about a nineteenth of Merge’s $252 million seed. It has not named a first use, medical or consumer, or a regulatory route.
Coverage on InsideBCI
- 8 October 2026: Bridge Neurotech raises $13.5 million to build a brain-computer interface without surgery
- 1 September 2026: Merge Labs picks Butterfly’s ultrasound-on-chip for its brain-computer interface build
- 19 September 2026: Arbor Neuroscience CEO Philip Sabes tells Shanghai BCI symposium that prediction is the neuromodulation bottleneck