A New Investor Joins the Biological Computing Bet

Cortical Labs, the Australian startup building computing systems from living human neurons, has secured investment from Malaysia-based Gobi Partners through its Dana Impak Ventures fund, which is backed by Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional. The round was co-led by Horizon Ventures and 3C, with Tom Oxley, founder of brain-computer interface company Synchron, also participating.

The investment amount was not disclosed. Cortical Labs’ CL1 platform — described as the first commercially available, code-deployable biological computer — cultures laboratory-grown human neurons on electrode arrays connected to silicon systems, enabling real-time experiments on neural networks.

Malaysia as a Manufacturing Base

Cortical Labs has established engineering and manufacturing operations at SIDEC’s IC Design Park in Puchong, Malaysia. The company plans to use the new capital to expand into chip design, integrating biological systems with custom semiconductor components. The expansion is expected to create roles in neuroscience, chip design, and computational biology.

The investment represents a strategic bet on biological neural networks as an alternative computing paradigm. As AI workloads drive demand for ever more computational power, Cortical Labs argues that living neurons — which operate at a fraction of the energy cost of silicon — offer a fundamentally different approach to processing. The company’s technology also has applications in pharmaceutical research, allowing researchers to observe how neural tissue responds to drugs in real time.

Strategic Significance

The participation of Synchron’s founder is notable. It signals cross-pollination between the brain-computer interface sector and the broader biological computing space. Companies building hardware that interfaces with neural tissue and companies growing neural tissue as hardware are converging on a shared technical frontier — and increasingly sharing investors.