Tuesday, October 13, 2026
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Tag: Merge-Labs

5 articles

Market Moves

Sabi raises $50 million for a brain-sensing baseball cap

Khosla Ventures has led a $50 million seed round in Sabi, a California startup building a baseball cap meant to turn imagined words and trained mental commands into text and instructions for AI assistants. Accel, Initialized Capital, former OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil, DST Global, Collaborative Fund and Ascend also invested, Sabi announced on 9 October 2026. Forbes put the valuation at $600 million, citing a person familiar with the deal. The cap is designed to read brain signals through hair with sensors built around a custom EEG chip, and to decode them with a model Sabi says was trained on more than 100,000 hours of labelled recordings. In April, Sabi said its first product would be a beanie available by the end of 2026. The cap will now debut as an early prototype at CES in January, and Forbes reported that it will not be available until 2027. Sabi has named no price and published no peer-reviewed results, and its only accuracy figure, up to 77 per cent, comes from a wired laboratory prototype.

Oct 11

Market Moves

Bridge Neurotech raises $13.5 million to build a brain-computer interface without surgery

Bridge Neurotech, a Silicon Valley start-up founded in 2026 by Will Biederman, came out of stealth on 6 October with $13.5 million from General Catalyst, reMind Capital, Sunflower Capital, Scott Sandell and others to build a wearable brain-computer interface that images brain activity with functional ultrasound through the skull. It has signed a multi-year research and development agreement to license Butterfly Network's Ultrasound-on-Chip technology, with payments for technology access and development milestones and commitments to buy Butterfly hardware; the value was not disclosed. Biederman co-founded the ultrasound research group Forest Neurotech, which signed a five-year, $20 million co-development deal with Butterfly in 2023. Forest's other two co-founders, Sumner Norman and Tyson Aflalo, went on to co-found Merge Labs, which signed its own Butterfly licensing deal on 1 September. Bridge's first research study, which is observational, is enrolling healthy adults and adults whose skulls were repaired with PEEK or Longeviti implants in Redwood City, California.

Oct 8

Market Moves

BCI-Sonics closes RMB 200 million Pre-A led by HongShan and Yunqi Partners

Shanghai-headquartered non-invasive brain-computer interface company BCI-Sonics closed a RMB 200 million (~USD 28 million) Pre-A financing round on Tuesday 22 September 2026, co-led by HongShan (the post-2023 rebrand of Sequoia China under Neil Shen) and Yunqi Partners. New participants included Proxima Capital, Oriza Holdings, Shanghai's Xuhui Sci-Tech Innovation Investment, and Moral Stone Investment. Existing investors Matrix Partners China (MPCi) and Delian Capital followed on. Xunguang Capital served as exclusive financial advisor. Total capital raised since 2025 founding is roughly RMB 300 million. The company was founded by Dr. Li Xin, formerly Head of GE Global Research Center China and a joint PhD graduate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Fraunhofer IGD in Germany. BCI-Sonics' modality is low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS/LIFU) for brain stimulation, paired with a multimodal reading system combining functional ultrasound (fUS), EEG, fMRI and PET, and passive cavitation detection for safety monitoring. Three product lines are in development: a Research toolchain for neuroscience labs (unveiled at CNS 2026 in September), a Clinical portfolio targeting pain, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, addiction, sleep, and ultrasound-mediated blood-brain-barrier opening for CNS drug delivery, and a Technology/Consumer wearable BCI terminal for sleep, focus and emotion. Closed-loop ultrasound BCI clinical trials are scheduled to enter Q1 2027. The Pre-A closed the same day Premier Li Qiang inspected BCI products in Shanghai and directed the establishment of future-industry investment-growth and risk-sharing mechanisms and 'patient capital' (耐心资本) expansion.

Sep 24

Industry News

Apple acquires neural-sensor startup Sonera Magnetics

Apple's acquisition of Berkeley-based magnetic-sensor startup Sonera Magnetics, closed in May 2026 and disclosed publicly on 8 September 2026 via the European Commission's Digital Markets Act acquisitions database, is the company's first move from hosting third-party brain-computer interface signals to owning proprietary neural-sensor IP. Sonera builds solid-state acoustically-driven ferromagnetic resonance (ADFMR) magnetometers, a room-temperature alternative to SQUID-based magnetoencephalography (MEG). The company raised US$11 million in seed financing in September 2023 from a lead-heavy syndicate including Founders Fund, Benchmark, Amplify Partners, IVP, Craft Ventures, and 8VC. Deal terms were not disclosed. Sonera's website was taken offline post-acquisition. Apple's prior BCI-adjacent moves were the AirPods ear-canal biosignal patent (filed January 2023), the BCI HID accessibility protocol for iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and visionOS 26 launched with Synchron on 13 May 2025, and hosting of Cognixion's non-invasive EEG clinical trial on Vision Pro from October 2025. Owning Sonera's magnetic-sensor IP puts Apple directly against Meta's Neural Band (surface EMG) and the non-surgical BCI operator field (Merge Labs ultrasound, Subsense nanoparticle, Neurable EEG earbuds).

Sep 9

Industry News

Merge Labs picks Butterfly's ultrasound-on-chip for its brain-computer interface build

Merge Labs, the US$252 million OpenAI-backed neural interface startup, has selected Butterfly Network (NYSE:BFLY) as its exclusive ultrasound-on-chip supplier under a multi-year Butterfly Embedded licensing deal announced 1 September 2026. The agreement covers Butterfly's Poseidon Family of Ultrasound-on-Chip for Merge's neural interface development, with upfront payments, milestones, hardware purchase commitments, technology access fees, and future royalties. Financial figures were not disclosed. Butterfly retains the right to license the same technology to other companies in the field. Ultrasound BCI now has a US-listed industrial supply chain.

Sep 1