Founders Fund and the OpenAI Startup Fund co-lead Coherence Neuro's US$45 million round

By Inside BCI · Edited by Velco Dar · October 22, 2026

Between late May and late June, three people having brain tumours removed at the Royal Melbourne Hospital had a thin, flexible film of electrodes laid on the surface of their brain for about half an hour during surgery. The film recorded electrical activity around the tumour and was then taken out. It was the first human test for Coherence Neuro, a start-up that wants to leave a device in the brain after surgery to watch for the cancer’s return and fight it with electrical stimulation.

On 21 October Coherence announced it had raised US$45 million to take that idea into a long-term trial. Founders Fund and the OpenAI Startup Fund co-led the round, which the company calls its Series A.

The round

Lux Capital, 8VC, Timeless, Olive Capital and Ahren joined as new investors. Angels in the round include Matthew MacDougall, Neuralink’s head neurosurgeon and an existing adviser and investor, and Rory Murphy, a neurosurgeon and investigator on Neuralink’s PRIME study at the Barrow Neurological Institute. Earlier backers Blackbird, Possible, Topology, Artesian, XEIA, Xtal and Divergent also invested again. Coherence raised a US$10 million seed round, led by Artesian and Topology Ventures, in November 2025.

Coherence says the money will fund its first long-term human trial in glioblastoma, an application for FDA Breakthrough Device designation and preclinical work in pancreatic cancer. It describes its goal as “cancer therapy that learns”. Ben Woodington, its chief executive, said nothing in the contracts or arrangements would give OpenAI access to any brain or health data the company generates.

The company and the devices

Woodington and Elise Jenkins, its chief technology officer, met as PhD students in the University of Cambridge’s bioelectronics laboratory and set up the company in Cambridge in 2022. It now has offices in San Francisco and Cambridge, and runs its first clinical study in Australia.

That study uses CIPHER, a temporary probe placed on the brain’s surface during surgery for newly diagnosed glioma. It is registered to enrol 10 patients at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. The first three were recorded only, and Coherence is now testing recording and stimulation in the other seven. The device Coherence intends to leave in place is SOMA, an implant the size of a shirt button with up to 16 fine threads that extend from the implant into the surrounding tissue. No patient has received SOMA yet. In an October 2025 interview, Woodington said he expected the first long-term implants by late 2027.

The evidence that the approach can track tumours comes from mice so far. In a July preprint that has not been peer reviewed, Coherence scientists and Stanford’s Michelle Monje reported that recordings from devices implanted in mice with brain tumours, analysed with machine learning, predicted how much tumour each animal carried.

Why it matters

Glioblastoma is the most common malignant primary brain tumour. An estimated 13,930 new US cases were expected in 2025, median survival is about eight months, and about 7 per cent of patients survive five years. After treatment, patients typically have an MRI scan every few months, and Coherence argues that an implant reading the tumour’s electrical activity continuously could catch a recurrence between scans. The idea builds on a 2019 Nature study from Monje’s Stanford laboratory, which found that glioma cells form working synapses with neurons. Novocure’s Optune, a device worn on the scalp that delivers electric fields, has been FDA-approved for recurrent glioblastoma since 2011 and for newly diagnosed disease since 2015.

Founders Fund led Neuralink’s US$280 million Series D in 2023. The OpenAI Startup Fund’s investors include Microsoft and other OpenAI partners; the fund says OpenAI itself is not an investor. OpenAI the company invested directly in Merge Labs, the brain-computer interface start-up Sam Altman co-founded in a personal capacity, in January 2026, reportedly writing the largest single cheque in a seed round of about US$250 million and agreeing to work with it on scientific foundation models.

Woodington argues that implants generate data that can train better models and improve treatment over time. Coherence has not published the terms behind its assurance on OpenAI, or said what data rights its other investors hold.

Not disclosed

Coherence has not disclosed an exact valuation, the amounts each investor put in, or which OpenAI Startup Fund vehicle invested. It has not published results from the Melbourne study, said how many of the seven stimulation patients have been treated, or named the country, sites and a firm start date for the long-term SOMA trial.

What to watch

Whether Coherence publishes recording and stimulation results from the Royal Melbourne Hospital study.

Whether the FDA grants SOMA Breakthrough Device designation.

Whether the first long-term SOMA implants take place by the end of 2027, and in which country.

Whether other AI investors in brain-implant companies make similar commitments on access to patient data.

Sources

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Cross-reference to prior InsideBCI coverage:

market Coherence-Neuro OpenAI-Startup-Fund Founders-Fund Ben-Woodington Elise-Jenkins glioblastoma brain-tumour Royal-Melbourne-Hospital CIPHER SOMA neural-data Series-A