Fluent, a University of Melbourne spinout, raises over two million dollars for a sub-scalp EEG speech-decoding implant

By Inside BCI · June 30, 2026

People with motor neurone disease and multiple sclerosis lose the muscle control needed to speak, and the communication options available to them today are dominated by eye-gaze tablets, letter boards, and the Stephen-Hawking-style speech synthesiser Casey Harrell used before receiving his implanted brain-computer interface in July 2023 at UC Davis.

A University of Melbourne spinout called Fluent is now raising commercial capital to build a third route. The company was founded in May 2025 out of the Melbourne Biomedical Engineering department, with sub-scalp electroencephalography (EEG) hardware inserted under the scalp but outside the skull, positioned over the motor cortex region that controls speech muscles. The device is branded InScribe. Fluent announced on 30 June 2026 that it has raised over two million dollars in seed capital, per the University of Melbourne’s own press release announcing the round.

The named investors in the seed round are the University of Melbourne Genesis Pre-Seed Fund, Galileo Ventures, Multiple Sclerosis Western Australia (MSWA), Jumpspace Ventures in New York, Founder’s Factory in London, Pacific Channel in Auckland, and Professor David Grayden personally. Fluent’s chief executive is Dr Tim Mahoney, biomedical engineer and Fluent co-founder. Its chief technology officer is Dr Dean Freestone, formerly of the epilepsy monitoring company Seer Medical and the sub-scalp EEG company Epiminder. Its advisory board includes Professor David Grayden, the Clifford Chair of Neural Engineering at the University of Melbourne and a co-author on Synchron’s 2016 Nature Biotechnology paper describing the Stentrode endovascular electrode. Fluent’s planned surgeon of record for its first-in-human procedure is Associate Professor Andrew Morokoff, neurosurgeon at Royal Melbourne Hospital. The company is based at the Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery on the St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne campus.

What InScribe actually is

The device belongs to the sub-scalp EEG category, which sits between two more familiar BCI positions. Fully non-invasive wearable EEG systems (Cognixion, Neurable, Emotiv, plus consumer-grade wristbands and headsets) read scalp signals through hair and skin. Fully intracranial systems (Neuralink’s N1, Paradromics’ Connexus, Precision Neuroscience’s Layer 7, Blackrock’s Utah arrays) penetrate the brain tissue directly or sit on the cortical surface. Sub-scalp EEG places the electrodes surgically beneath the skin of the scalp but above the skull bone, keeping the electrodes closer to the neural source than a surface electrode while avoiding intracranial surgery. Epiminder, an earlier Melbourne spinout, built the regulatory predicate for this category with a sub-scalp implant used for chronic seizure monitoring in adults with drug-resistant epilepsy.

Fluent’s contribution is to point the sub-scalp EEG substrate at speech decoding rather than epilepsy monitoring. Mahoney’s own 2025 Journal of Neural Engineering paper (Mahoney, Grayden, John: “Sub-scalp EEG for sensorimotor brain-computer interface”) is the peer-reviewed foundation. The device records from the region of motor cortex that drives the mouth, jaw, and tongue during speech, and machine-learning software converts the recorded patterns into intended text. The company reports 96 per cent selection accuracy on a 128-phrase closed vocabulary using a larger dataset assembled in collaboration with an unnamed Japanese research team; this is a benchmark figure rather than a real-world clinical throughput number.

Where Fluent sits in the Australian BCI ecosystem

Fluent is the second commercially-serious Australian brain-computer interface company after Synchron. Synchron was co-founded by Tom Oxley and Nick Opie at the University of Melbourne’s Vascular Bionics Laboratory, is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, and runs the endovascular Stentrode implant now in its COMMAND clinical trial. Nick Opie subsequently joined the board of the Australian Securities Exchange listed BCI company Control Bionics (ASX code CBL) in May 2026, as Inside BCI has covered separately.

Fluent’s lineage traces to a different University of Melbourne lab. Where Synchron grew out of the Vascular Bionics Laboratory led by Opie, Fluent grew out of the Melbourne Biomedical Engineering department around David Grayden’s group, with additional connections to Seer Medical (Freestone), Epiminder (Freestone), the University of Melbourne’s Andrew Morokoff, and Sam John. Grayden was a co-author on the 2016 Stentrode paper, so the two lineages share personal history without sharing corporate lineage. The combined effect is that Australia now has two clinical-stage BCI companies with distinct signal modalities (endovascular for Synchron, sub-scalp for Fluent), distinct clinical entry points (paralysis and cursor control for Synchron, speech decoding in motor neurone disease for Fluent), and distinct commercial trajectories (Synchron US-market first, Fluent Australian-market first with intended global expansion).

The sub-scalp category itself has a regulatory precedent through Epiminder’s platform. Fluent’s founding team includes people who built that regulatory precedent and are now using the same class of device for a different clinical application.

What to watch

First-in-human implantation is scheduled for 2026 in Melbourne, with Morokoff as the surgeon of record and the Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery as the surgical facility. A public dated announcement of the first surgery would be the next verifiable milestone.

Peer-reviewed data on speech decoding performance from Fluent participants (as distinct from Mahoney’s earlier sensorimotor-BCI paper) would be the second signal worth tracking. The 96 per cent accuracy figure Fluent has publicly cited is drawn from a closed 128-phrase pool and an unnamed Japanese collaborating dataset; a first-participant readout in an open peer-reviewed venue would convert the number from a benchmark to a clinical claim.

The regulatory pathway Fluent chooses is the third signal. Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration approval and US Food and Drug Administration Breakthrough Device Designation are the two most obvious near-term regulatory milestones, and neither has been publicly announced.

Whether Fluent runs on a company-only track or opens a strategic partnership with an established BCI player is the fourth question. Grayden’s personal history as a co-author on the 2016 Stentrode paper does not imply a Synchron partnership, but it does mean the two Australian BCI companies now have overlapping human capital in ways that could either compete or collaborate depending on how the commercial cadence develops.

Sources

market Australia Fluent InScribe sub-scalp-EEG University-of-Melbourne Tim-Mahoney David-Grayden Dean-Freestone MND MS speech-decoding

What InScribe actually is

Where Fluent sits in the Australian BCI ecosystem

What to watch

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