Exclusive: Nanochap Raises RMB 500 Million Series C+ Round, Moving at "China Speed" in Visual BCI

VCBeat has learned that Hangzhou Nanochap Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter "Nanochap") has announced the completion of a RMB 500 million Series C+ financing round led by Gaorong Ventures, with PICC Capital Equity Investment Co., Ltd., Monolith Management, Xiamen C&D Emerging Industry Equity Investment Co., Ltd., Hangzhou Orient Jiafu Asset Management Company Limited, Danhe Capital and Hangzhou Industrial Investment Group participating, existing shareholders including Legend Capital and well-known industrial investment institutions oversubscribing, and Qifeng Capital serving as exclusive financial advisor for this round.

This is also the second round of financing Nanochap has secured this year. To date, the company's cumulative financing has reached RMB 1 billion. Winning consecutive backing from top-tier capital within an extremely short period testifies to Nanochap's hardcore technological innovation strength and the scarcity value of its track.

Visual restoration is regarded as the "jewel in the crown" of the brain-computer interface field, and also a battleground where global technological forces meet head-on.

Across the ocean, Neuralink's visual restoration product Blindsight has received the US FDA's "Breakthrough Device" designation and is scheduled for human implantation in 2026. PRIMA, the retinal visual BCI product of US brain-computer company Science Corporation, has been approved for commercial use in Europe on the strength of clinical data published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Behind this race lies enormous unmet demand from tens of millions of blind people and hundreds of millions of visually impaired patients worldwide.

In China, brain-computer interfaces have been incorporated into the national strategy, and the country's first GCP clinical trial of a high-resolution retinal-pathway visual BCI comes precisely from Nanochap. Judging from completed clinical cases, the first subject could recognize complex letters the day after the device was switched on, and within two months achieved writing, grasping and directional walking. This recovery speed far exceeds the international norm, marking a global lead for Nanochap in both the speed and quality of visual restoration.

To date, Nanochap has successfully completed BCI clinical trials in three patients. In May 2026, a retinal visual BCI containing 320 electrical stimulation channels was implanted into the fundus of Lingling (pseudonym), who had been blind for nearly 20 years. On the second day after activation, she recognized complex letters such as H and R, exceeding the team's expectations; over the following two months, Lingling's "new vision" gradually grew: she wrote the Chinese characters for "China", picked up a water cup, walked along a white line on the floor and turned corners.

Three months later in Wuhan, 60-year-old Qiu Hua (pseudonym) received the world's first high-resolution semi-invasive retinal BCI implant, which does not penetrate the eyeball and is minimally invasive and reversible. After four years of darkness, Qiu Hua, once the device was switched on, recognized the numbers before her one by one, wrote Chinese characters and letters, grasped objects and completed independent walking.

In October 2026, Ms. Li (pseudonym), 66, who had been blind for eight years, underwent the country's first subchoroidal implantation in the macular region of a retinal-pathway visual BCI. From having only faint light perception, she progressed to tracing numbers, letters and Chinese characters, accurately grasping objects, and then, for the first time, completing a walking test on her own without her family's support.

Looking globally, most visual BCI companies bet on only one pathway: Science Corporation's PRIMA takes the retinal pathway, while Neuralink's Blindsight takes the visual cortex pathway, and getting even one of the two pathways through is no easy feat.

As the Chinese tech company that has worked longest in the field of visual function restoration BCI, Nanochap has innovatively laid out a complete dual-track solution running the retinal-pathway E-BCI and the visual cortex-pathway V-BCI in parallel, offering the possibility of visual restoration for different types of blind patients.

The confidence behind Nanochap's dual-track advance comes from a shared, full-stack in-house technology system. Since 2014, Nanochap has built a full-stack in-house system spanning core chips, precision electrodes, MEMS processes, packaging technology, intelligent algorithms and system integration, overcome a number of "bottleneck" core technologies, and established a visual BCI R&D and industrialization platform that leads in China and globally, laying a solid technological foundation for clinical translation and long-term iteration of its products.

Left: Lingling writes "China"; right: Nanochap's visual BCI external unit

At present, the 320-channel retinal visual BCI E-BCI has formally entered the GCP-standardized clinical trial stage, with notable staged results and preliminary clinical verification of safety and efficacy, making Nanochap one of the few domestic companies to achieve a substantive breakthrough in human clinical trials of invasive visual BCI.

Meanwhile, the 1,280-channel visual cortex BCI product is in the R&D stage and plans to undergo clinical validation. From "seeing" to "seeing clearly", the next leap in resolution is about to begin.

Nanochap's three clinical trials have proven the possibility of "seeing" again. What is truly exciting is that when visual signals no longer come from the eyeball but from cameras and algorithms, the boundary of "seeing" will be redefined.

Musk has described the roadmap for Blindsight: initially only low-resolution light dots, with the potential to ultimately surpass natural vision and let people see infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. Max Hodak, founder of Science Corporation, judges that brain-computer interfaces may reshape human experience, and believes that biohybrid neural interfaces will "reshape the world in unexpected ways".

The world the implant "sees" is itself a rewritable, augmentable digital signal: the number of electrical stimulation channels can keep doubling from 60 to 320 and 1,280, with resolution rising accordingly; neural encoding can move from 256-level grayscale to full color; cameras can zoom, provide night vision, and overlay navigation and text information. Vision will become a sense that humans can "upgrade".

Lingling, Qiu Hua and Ms. Li are the first users. What they read today are letters and numbers, and as technology develops, visual restoration will keep expanding the boundaries of human perception. With every doubling of channel count and every generation of encoding algorithms, Nanochap takes one more step forward on the road of visual restoration.