Brainsmart Technology Secures Over $10 Million in Angel Round Funding to Accelerate Development of Invasive BCIs and Neural Foundation Models

Recently, Brainsmart Technology, an innovative brain-computer interface enterprise, announced the completion of its angel round series financing of over $10 million. The round was led successively by Bayland Capital and Lanchi Ventures, with Fosun Health Capital as a follow-on investor. Proceeds from this round will be mainly used to advance product engineering, develop neural foundation models, and build GMP production facilities, so as to accelerate addressing the challenges of stable application of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) in real-world scenarios.

2026 is regarded as the inaugural year of the global brain-computer interface (BCI) industry. The inflection point marking the industry’s transition from academic research to an accelerated application phase has arrived. Brain-computer interfaces have been listed as one of the six key future industries prioritized in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan and included in the government work report, forming a " three-dimensional synergy of technology + policy + capital ". At this historical window of opportunity, teams endowed with both top-tier academic credentials and efficient industrialization capabilities will take the lead to stand out from the track.

Brainsmart Technology was founded and led by Professor Paddy Chan of the University of Hong Kong, built upon the world-class research platform of InnoHK-ABIC under the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission. Professor Chan also serves as Executive Director of the InnoHK-Advanced Biomedical Instrumental Center and Director of the Central Fabrication Laboratory at the University of Hong Kong. He boasts distinguished achievements in academic research, scientific research management and technology commercialization.

The Advanced Biomedical Instrumentation Centre (ABIC) was jointly established by the University of Hong Kong and Harvard University. As one of the core translational institutions under Hong Kong’s InnoHK platform, it has built profound expertise in advanced life science research, technology management and research commercialization. This strong academic background endows Brainsmart Technology with rare core resources: world-class engineering research capabilities in brain-computer interfaces, a dual domestic and international intellectual property network, and extensive experience spanning from top-tier laboratory research to clinical translation.

Brainsmart Technology is driven by a diverse and interdisciplinary team with full-stack industrial vision. Its core roster brings together scientists, serial entrepreneurs, investors from top-tier institutions, senior executives of listed medical device companies, and frontline clinical experts.Moving beyond a pure lab-oriented mindset, the team adheres to stringent industrial standards throughout all operations, building a complete ecosystem that spans cutting-edge academic exploration, medical-grade productization, and large-scale commercialization. Such profound industrial underpinnings enable invasive brain-computer interface technology to transit efficiently from the laboratory to real-world application via the most streamlined path.

High-density Flexible ECoG Thin-film Electrodes —— A Precise Balance Between Functionality and Safety：

Currently, brain-computer interface technology faces a common bottleneck in the global market — how to collect as rich and high-resolution neural signals as possible with minimal trauma. The first-generation core product of Brainsmart Technology High-Density Flexible Thin-Film Brain-Computer Interface Electrode. It is the optimal solution to balance these two aspects. On one hand, with electrodes placed epidurally, the invasiveness of the implantation surgery can be significantly reduced, minimizing immune responses and the risk of tissue damage, thereby enabling long-term stable signal acquisition. On the other hand, it achieves higher-density neural signal acquisition per unit area, effectively compensating for the insufficient spatial resolution of traditional ECoG electrodes, and fundamentally enhancing the accuracy and reliability of neural intent decoding.

3D Intracortical Microneedle Electrode Array —— The Core Carrier for High-Bandwidth Neural Information Interaction：

Meanwhile, Brainsmart Technology is simultaneously advancing the development of 3D intracortical micro-needle electrode arrays. Neurons within the cerebral cortex essentially transmit and compute information through discrete temporal action potential (spike) signals. To understand the core mechanisms of brain function and achieve higher bandwidth brain-computer interaction, directly acquiring and decoding such signals is a crucial pathway. However, intracortical electrodes have long faced a trade-off between invasiveness and performance—improving signal resolution often results in greater tissue damage and immune response, a contradiction that existing technologies have yet to adequately resolve. Brainsmart Technology has made significant R&D progress in novel flexible materials, advanced electrode structures, and 3D contact arrangements, which are expected to significantly reduce tissue damage caused by intracortical electrode implantation while achieving extremely high spatiotemporal resolution within the implanted area. In the future, these intracortical micro-needle electrode arrays could be used in conjunction with high-density ECoG electrodes covering the brain's surface, forming a three-dimensional neural signal acquisition system combining " planar + vertical " approaches to obtain more comprehensive and richer brain neural information.

Beyond hardware, precise decoding of neural signals serves as the core essence for brain-computer interface systems to deliver real-world functions. All along, BCI technology has been confronted with three major severe challenges in neural signal decoding:

· Neural signals inevitably suffer from temporal drift and variation over time;

· Significant individual differences exist in brain structure and neural characteristics across users;

· Brain signal patterns vary substantially under different tasks and scenarios.

Traditional brain-computer interface systems usually require collecting massive neural signal data specifically for individual users to train dedicated decoding algorithms. They lack a universal decoding solution with generalization capability to address signal drift, inter-individual differences, and cross-task scenario variations. Therefore, existing systems often demand personalized training for each user and frequent recalibration to mitigate performance degradation caused by temporal changes in neural signals. This not only results in a lengthy and cumbersome learning and adaptation process for users, but also makes system operation and maintenance highly reliant on professional technicians. Such systems can hardly operate stably over long periods outside laboratory settings, nor can they be widely deployed in household environments and daily life scenarios. This substantially raises the overall application cost and market adoption barrier of brain-computer interface technologies.

Against the backdrop of the booming development of artificial intelligence (AI), academic evidence has demonstrated that Neural Foundation Models, built upon architectures analogous to large language models (LLMs) and trained via large-scale pre-training paradigms, are poised to become a key technological pathway driving the qualitative transformation of brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Unlike conventional decoding methods that rely on user-specific training, Neural Foundation Models can learn universal neural representations across individuals, tasks and time from large-scale neural data, thereby substantially reducing system calibration and training costs. This means BCI technology now has the unprecedented opportunity to evolve into a true plug-and-play application paradigm, serving as a human intelligence augmentation platform that rapidly adapts to a wide range of downstream tasks. It enables users to achieve seamless, intuitive brain-computer interaction in a more natural and accessible manner.

Brainsmart Technology has built an AI algorithm team composed of neural decoding scientists with backgrounds from Northwestern University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and Huawei. The team is committed to developing world-leading Neural Foundation Models and exploring their deployment and application in long-term, multi-task and cross-individual scenarios.

Leveraging the dual strengths of innovative electrode devices and advanced neural decoding algorithms, Brainsmart Technology’s first-generation products will deeply integrate BCI hardware systems with Neural Foundation Models, focusing on two core application scenarios.The first is Thought-to-Speech: Enabling patients who have lost the ability to speak due to stroke, ALS and other conditions to regain verbal communication capabilities.The second is Thought Control: Helping patients with complete or partial physical paralysis directly control external devices via brain signals, and restore independence in daily life and professional activities.

Brainsmart Technology has established a research and development system based on the Shenzhen-Hong Kong collaborative model, integrating top-tier academic resources, R&D capabilities, and the strengths of high-end manufacturing and industrial clusters into one integrated framework:

● Hong Kong Team：Focuses on the R&D of core electrode devices, the analysis of BCI neural mechanisms, and research on advanced neural decoding algorithms. Leveraging ABIC’s world-class technological expertise and experimental platform advantages in micro-nano fabrication, the team builds the core technological system for BCI.;

●Shenzhen Team: Takes charge of product engineering and industrial implementation, including collaborative hardware and software development, manufacturing process optimization, supply chain establishment, and GMP production, as well as advancing clinical trials and medical device registration certification. 

The two teams feature clear division of labor and complementary resources, jointly forming a complete value chain spanning from basic research to clinical translation, which greatly shortens the cycle from technological innovation to commercialization. Since its official establishment in 2025, Brainsmart Technology has achieved leapfrog development within just one year, completing core technology verification, product prototype design, formal testing, and multiple clinical studies. It has laid a solid foundation for future large-scale clinical trials.