Cortical Labs, the Melbourne-based synthetic biological intelligence company behind the CL1 biological computer and the 2022 DishBrain neuron-on-chip study, has appointed co-founder Brett Kagan as Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. The appointment took effect on 28 August 2026. Kagan was previously the company’s Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Operating Officer. Co-founder Hon Weng Chong steps down as CEO after seven years in the role.
Cortical Labs is not a brain-computer interface operator. The CL1 platform runs computation on lab-grown human neurons on multielectrode arrays rather than reading signals from an implanted human brain. The direction of information flow is inverted compared with a BCI. Cortical Labs is a synthetic biological intelligence and biological computing company, and this article covers the leadership transition as adjacent-category news rather than as a BCI operator update.
An internal elevation, not an external search
Kagan has been central to Cortical Labs from its earliest research through to the commercialisation of its biological computing technology, and has led sales and commercialisation of the platform alongside his scientific and operating roles. The board describes the transition as the outcome of a “considered transition process” providing continuity of leadership, strategy and scientific direction. Kagan will work alongside the existing scientific, engineering and commercial leadership.
His stated priorities as CEO are expanding global access to CL1 and Cortical Cloud, advancing the research and product roadmap, and building commercial and academic partnerships across biological computing, neuroscience and drug discovery. Existing customer and partner commitments continue, including the collaboration with NUS Medicine and DayOne on the Biological Data Centre prototype at the NUS Life Sciences Institute in Singapore.
Kagan said: “We have spent years demonstrating that biological computing is possible. The opportunity now is to show what it can make possible at scale… My focus as CEO is clear: continue advancing the science, deliver for our customers and partners, and build Cortical Labs into the company that defines this emerging category of computing.”
Long-time investor Atlanta Daniel of Radar Ventures said: “Cortical Labs is entering an important new phase. They have moved from proving the foundations of biological computing to building a commercial platform that can put this technology into the hands of researchers and organisations around the world.”
Kagan’s own framing
On LinkedIn, Kagan thanked Hon Weng Chong, Andy Kitchen and Andrew Doherty (the company’s Chief Hardware Officer) for the journey to date and set a forward-looking anchor for the transition: “Stepping into the CEO role, I’m incredibly excited to do my part to help Cortical Labs to continue to grow. We have a lot of incredible things in the pipeline; some are really going to reshape the way people look at neurocomputing.”
He closed on the founding thesis: “What was once science fiction has become science… and we are only just getting started.” The claim to watch here is neurocomputing reshaping. The market will now measure that against Kagan’s pipeline disclosures over the coming quarters.
Kagan and the DishBrain lineage
Brett Kagan, PhD, joined Cortical Labs as Chief Scientific Officer at founding in 2019 and is the first author of the company’s flagship 2022 Neuron paper, “In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world” (Neuron 110(23):3952-3969, DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.09.001). That paper described approximately 800,000 mouse cortical and human iPSC-derived neurons on a multielectrode array learning to play Pong in a closed-loop simulation. It drew significant peer response, including a nomenclature critique in Neuron (2023) that Kagan later engaged with in a multi-author consensus paper (Kagan et al., The Innovation, September 2024, DOI 10.1016/j.xinn.2024.100658) that also included Synchron’s Nicholas Opie.
Kagan’s scientific credibility on the DishBrain-to-CL1 arc has been a distinct positioning asset for the company. Elevating the scientific co-founder to CEO is a common pattern when a platform company moves from research to commercial scaling and needs scientific ownership at the top.
The commercial base at handover
The CL1 launched in March 2025. By 2026 Cortical Labs had stood up what it describes as the world’s first Biological Data Centre prototype in Melbourne, comprising 120 internet-connected CL1 units running the Cortical Cloud platform. A separate 20-unit CL1 biological computing system has been deployed at the National University of Singapore in partnership with NUS Medicine and DayOne. These are the first named third-party deployments of the platform at scale, alongside the Melbourne prototype infrastructure.
Per Cortical Labs’ public materials and coverage of the March 2025 Mobile World Congress launch, a CL1 unit is priced at approximately US$35,000, runs on roughly 850 to 1,000 watts, and keeps human iPSC-derived neurons alive on-chip for up to six months via internal life-support. Cortical Cloud is the company’s Wetware-as-a-Service offering with a Python SDK, running on the proprietary biOS (Biological Intelligence Operating System). Cortical Labs’ category framing is Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI).
Hon Weng Chong and the founding team
Hon Weng Chong co-founded Cortical Labs in 2019 alongside Kagan and computer scientist Andy Kitchen. Chong is a medical doctor and software engineer and previously co-founded CliniCloud. Chong served as CEO from founding for seven years. His next role has not been disclosed.
Funding history
Cortical Labs raised a US$1.62 million seed in June 2019 backed by Blackbird Ventures and January Capital. A US$10 million Series A in April 2023 was led by Horizons Ventures with participation from Blackbird, LifeX, Radar Ventures, and In-Q-Tel (the CIA venture arm). No subsequent priced round has been publicly disclosed. Radar Ventures’ Atlanta Daniel appearing as the sole external voice in the transition announcement is consistent with Radar’s Series A participation and Daniel being described as “long-time investor.”
Where Cortical Labs sits relative to the InsideBCI beat
Cortical Labs sits outside the core InsideBCI beat. InsideBCI’s core beat is implanted and non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (Neuralink, Paradromics, Blackrock, Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, ABILITY Neurotech, StairMed WRS02, Weiling Medical, Neuracle, NeuroXess, NeuCyber, Merge Labs, Nudge, Gestala, Kernel, DARPA Firefox, DARPA SHINE, NATO DIANA, and the associated regulatory and capital layers). InsideBCI’s bioelectronic-medicine adjacency covers implantable peripheral-nerve and cardiac-neuromodulation platforms (CVRx Barostim, Orchestra BioMed AVIM, BlueWind Revi Extend, SetPoint Medical).
Cortical Labs sits in a distinct wet-computing and synthetic biological intelligence category with no direct commercial peer operating at the same scale. Its shared primitive with the BCI category is the interface between living neural tissue and silicon. That primitive is why a Kagan-as-CEO transition is worth flagging even though Cortical Labs is not a BCI operator: the field’s most credible scientist-founder on neuron-silicon interfaces is now running the leading commercial biological computing platform.
Not disclosed
Chong’s next role. Any board composition change. Any new funding round accompanying the leadership transition. CL1 commercial revenue figures, total unit-shipment count beyond the Melbourne 120-unit prototype and the Singapore 20-unit deployment, and named Cortical Cloud enterprise customers beyond NUS Medicine and DayOne. Whether Chong retains a board seat or founder equity position.
What to watch
Whether Cortical Labs discloses additional named Cortical Cloud deployments under Kagan. The Melbourne prototype and Singapore NUS deployment are the two disclosed sites. A third named site, particularly a US or European academic or commercial customer, would signal the platform is scaling geographically.
Whether Cortical Labs raises a new priced round in the coming quarters. The last disclosed round was the April 2023 US$10 million Series A. A follow-on round with Kagan as CEO, particularly one led by a new institutional investor, would signal the extent to which the investor base has taken the platform maturation seriously.
Whether Chong takes a next role in biological computing, synthetic biology, or adjacent categories. A founder stepping into a competing or complementary venture is a category-shaping signal in a field this small.
Whether the primitive Cortical Labs commercialises (living neural tissue on silicon) begins to interact meaningfully with the BCI category on either the training data side (using CL1-generated neural signals to train BCI decoders) or the biocompatibility side (interfaces between silicon and living neurons). That interaction, if it emerges, would move Cortical Labs from adjacent-category into direct BCI-supply-chain relevance.