Alibaba Bets on Millennial Female PhD-Led Startup Staircase Neurotech in Brain-Computer Interface Breakthrough

As Musk's Neuralink announces the "mass production year" in 2026, China's brain-computer interface sector sees significant capital moves.

On March 13, Shanghai StairMed Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as StairMed) announced the completion of a 500 million yuan strategic financing round, led by Alibaba, with participation from SDIC Chuanghe; existing shareholders Tencent, Origin Capital, Orbimed, Yuanhe Origin, Qiming Venture Partners, Lilly Asia Ventures, Source Code Capital, and Shanghai Guotou Xiandao also continued to follow up.

Thus, StairMed's cumulative financing in the past year has exceeded 1.1 billion yuan.

Notably, this is also the first company that Alibaba and Tencent have invested in within this field, reflecting the tech giants' ambition to lay out the infrastructure for the next generation of human-computer interaction.

Female Doctorate Returnee Leads the Team, Confronting the Global Technological Peak

The entrepreneurial story of StairMed began with the meeting of two young scientists. Its core founder, Li Xue, is an overseas returnee entrepreneur who graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology with a bachelor's degree. Between 2016 and 2020, she successively studied at the Cockrell School of Engineering, Biomedical Engineering Department of the University of Texas at Austin, and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, earning master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering from both institutions.

In 2020, Li Xue, who had completed her studies, chose to return to China and joined the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was here that she met Zhao Zhengtuo, also a scientific research backbone. Based on their shared scientific ideals and industrial ambitions, in 2021, Li Xue and Zhao Zhengtuo co-founded StairMed.

In terms of technical approach, StairMed has chosen an invasive technology route that shares its origins with Musk's Neuralink. Zhao Zhengtuo explained that for brain-computer interfaces, the technical difficulty increases progressively from non-invasive, semi-invasive to invasive methods, and so does the application value. "From the very beginning, our company, StairMed, has hoped to address the most challenging and valuable problems in development."

In just a few years, StairMed has mastered multiple globally leading technologies covering electrodes, systems, algorithms, surgical robots, and more. The company independently developed ultra-flexible electrodes as thin as 1/100 of a hair and the world’s smallest wireless brain-computer implant. In 2025, it will be the first in China to complete a prospective clinical trial of an invasive brain-computer interface, with its product entering the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) innovation "green channel."

Entering 2026, StairMed's clinical progress continues to accelerate. At the beginning of the year, relying on the company's self-developed surgical robot, StairMed successfully completed the clinical implantation of the 256-channel wireless high-throughput invasive brain-computer interface system (WRS02) planned for registration, and achieved effective validation of brain-controlled interaction functions.

According to the plan, the company intends to launch a large-scale, multi-center registration clinical trial by mid-2026, aiming to complete the enrollment and implant surgeries of approximately 40 patients within the year. By the end of 2026, StairMed's total number of clinical implants is expected to approach or even surpass the current total of clinical trials conducted by Neuralink, owned by Elon Musk (currently around 21 cases), marking that Chinese brain-computer interface companies are making a push toward becoming global leaders in commercialization and clinical implementation.

Alibaba's Debut in the Brain-Computer Interface Track

This leading investment marks Alibaba's first direct move into the brain-computer interface field. Prior to this, Alibaba's involvement mostly remained at the ecosystem synergy level — tentatively reaching this cutting-edge track through technical cooperation or indirect investments.

Alibaba Cloud once collaborated with Zhen Tai Intelligent on the algorithm platform. The latter is a startup focusing on brain-computer rehabilitation. Wang Haochong, founder of Zhen Tai Intelligent, stated, "The company is currently building a more robust underlying system architecture for the brain-computer interaction system, which requires strong cloud computing platform support. In the future, we will continue to explore cooperation with Alibaba Cloud to promote the application of brain-computer interface technology. This requires more R&D support to jointly explore the mysteries of the brain. We hope that through Alibaba Cloud, we can establish cooperative links with more enterprises in smart communities and smart healthcare."

This is exactly Alibaba's typical approach in the past: instead of direct investment, it provides infrastructure support to brain-computer interface startups by leveraging cloud computing, large models, and computing power as the fulcrum. Alibaba Cloud’s technical accumulation in fields such as multimodal large models, computing power, and smart hardware naturally positions it as an empowering entity.

A similar layout is also reflected in the moves of Ant Group. In July 2025, "Ant Alipay," the frontier technology platform under Ant Group, injected 1.5 billion yuan into Di'an Diagnosis, while systematically integrating Ant's accumulation in artificial intelligence, big data analysis, and brain-computer interface underlying technologies with Di'an Diagnosis' medical testing network, clinical data resources, and healthcare application scenarios.

The emergence of StairMed has allowed Alibaba to see an opportunity to enter the underlying operating system for the next generation of human-computer interaction. Invasive brain-computer interfaces inherently require large models, computational power support, and a terminal ecosystem to carry them—areas where Alibaba holds a distinct advantage.

Founder Li Xue stated, "Brain-computer interface is not only a medical technology but also the ultimate integration of life science and information technology." She believes that "the profound accumulation of major companies in multimodal large models, computing power infrastructure, smart hardware, and ecosystem deployment can deeply integrate with StairMed's globally leading brain-computer hardware barriers and clinical transformation experience in the future."

The financing of StairMed is not an isolated case, but a microcosm of the collective outbreak of China's brain-computer interface industry. Only in the first quarter of 2026, the industry has witnessed intensive movements:

At the end of January, StrongBrain Technologies submitted its IPO application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in a confidential manner; in February, Brain-Machine Interface technology company TrueInnovate announced the completion of its Series C financing; in the same month, invasive brain-computer interface company Zhiran Healthcare announced the completion of a 300 million RMB A+ round of financing; on March 12, GESTALT Tech, a hard-tech enterprise in China focusing on ultrasonic brain-computer interfaces, announced the completion of a 150 million RMB angel round of financing...

As major players like Alibaba and Tencent deeply enter the field, China's brain-computer interface industry is moving beyond the early stage of "individual efforts" into a new phase of collaborative development featuring "technology + capital + ecosystem." In this technological competition that will shape the future of human-machine relationships, StairMed, which Alibaba has invested in, may become a key force enabling China to overtake competitors in this global tech race.