Market Moves
Synchron's long road to reaching the brain through a blood vessel
Synchron began with a cold email from Tom Oxley to DARPA in 2011 and a US$1 million offer to build a brain implant that travels through the veins. Fifteen years on it has put its first-generation Stentrode into ten people in Melbourne and the United States, raised US$345 million, connected its implant to Apple devices, Amazon's Alexa and OpenAI's models, and started trials of a fully wireless second-generation device. Enrolment in its US and Australian trials is paused while Synchron upgrades the hardware, and the company says it will restart once that work is finished.