The most visible race in brain-computer interfaces involves surgery. But one of China’s most valuable neurotech firms is deliberately not competing in it, CNBC reports.
BrainCo, based in Hangzhou, builds devices that read the brain from outside the skull. Headbands and caps pick up electrical signals through the scalp, with no operating theatre involved.
The company is one of Hangzhou’s so-called six little dragons, the cluster of startups that has come to symbolise Chinese tech ambition. It was founded in 2015 and came out of the Harvard Innovation Labs.
What it actually makes
The clinical work is the most concrete. BrainCo’s bionic hands, which have US FDA approval, read an amputee’s neural and muscular signals and turn intended movements into finger motions.
From there the product line runs towards consumers. Its wearables include a sleep aid that uses low-intensity electrical pulses aimed at neurochemicals associated with stress relief.
That range is the strategy in miniature. Prove the technology in medicine, where the benefit is undeniable, then carry the sensors into everyday products.
Two philosophies, two funding models
The contrast with Neuralink is stark. Elon Musk’s company implants electrodes directly into brain tissue, a far more powerful signal at a far higher risk.
Implants are also getting real, with Paradromics putting a brain chip in its first patient and Science Corp preparing its own human placement. The invasive field is no longer a one-horse race.
China is running both tracks, having already approved the world’s first commercial brain implant. Non-invasive devices still account for roughly 82% of its domestic BCI market.
The money looks different too. American neurotech is largely bankrolled by billionaires, while China’s has seven ministries behind it, with a national BCI plan targeting key breakthroughs by 2027.
BrainCo has raised accordingly. It pulled in around 2 billion yuan, roughly $280m, co-led by IDG Capital, and has filed confidentially for a Hong Kong listing.
The part that should give you pause
Wearables lower the medical stakes and raise a different set. You cannot casually deploy a brain implant across a classroom, but you can absolutely deploy a headband.
BrainCo knows this better than most. In 2019 its Focus headbands, worn by pupils at a primary school in Zhejiang, were shown scoring children’s attention for teachers, and the backlash was ferocious.
The local education bureau halted the trial. BrainCo said the devices were used in school trials to improve learning efficiency and had not been sold to any public school.
The episode set out the real question early. Neural data is uniquely intimate, and the technology that is easiest to wear is also the easiest to point at people who did not choose it.
These worries are not new to the field, as the debate over what is exciting and what is alarming about brain-computer interfaces has run for years. What is new is the prospect of the technology arriving without a surgeon as gatekeeper.
The boundary nobody has drawn
Some in the field want a hard line. Neuralink rival Inbrain has said it will never take brain implants beyond healthcare, ruling out consumer uses entirely.
A wearable company cannot make that promise, because the consumer market is the whole point. That is the trade BrainCo has made, and it is a reasonable one for a business.
Whether it is a reasonable one for everybody else depends on rules that mostly do not exist yet. The surgery gets the headlines, but the headband is the thing likely to end up on millions of heads.
