Imagine a world where your thoughts are translated into commands for a computer, smartphone, or prosthetic limb.
No, this isn’t a pitch for a sequel to “Minority Report.” It’s the world a growing group of startups (backed by a who’s who of billionaires) are working to create right now — and one of those companies just got significantly closer to realizing this vision.
Mind-controlled technology
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are systems that allow direct communication between the brain and external machines. Some do this by using electrode-covered caps to monitor brain activity, but the most effective systems place electrodes under the skull, sometimes implanting them directly into the brain.
Once the electrodes are in place, the BCI is trained to decode the patient’s brain activity, turning the electrical signals produced when they think a certain thought into a command for a computer or another kind of device.
One day, these systems could make it so anyone can control their tech with their minds, but before we get there, developers want to use BCIs to help people overcome health issues, such as paralysis — once in place, the BCI could help an immobile person type on a screen or control a prosthetic limb using just their thoughts.
In recent years, we’ve seen a surge in the number of researchers trying to develop these sci-fi systems and in the number of investors backing them.
There’s a good reason for that interest, too. About 5.4 million people in the US live with a form of paralysis, and a BCI that helps treat their condition could be worth a lot of money. In 2024, Grand View Research estimated that the total addressable market for BCIs was $160 billion, while Morgan Stanley thinks that number can triple over the next decade.
Whether BCIs can actually help any of these people — and achieve the numbers Wall Street is floating — will come down to developers’ ability to get their products to the market, and one promising BCI startup, Precision Neuroscience, just took the lead in the race to commercialization.
Thinner. Safer. Smarter.
Precision’s co-founder and chief science officer, Benjamin Rapoport, has been at the BCI game for a while — in 2016, he co-founded Elon Musk’s BCI company, Neuralink, but he then decamped to start his own venture with Michael Mager, Precision’s current CEO, in 2021. Their goal is to develop a minimally-invasive, easy-to-implant BCI.
“It’s been very important for us all from the beginning to understand how the technology interacts with the medical ecosystem, with patients and physicians in a very practically minded way,” Rapoport told me. “That plays into the design of the system.”
The core component of Precision’s in-development BCI is the Layer 7 Cortical Interface. It looks like a wristband one would receive upon entering an outdoor music festival, but don’t be deceived by its visual flimsiness — although the strip is thinner than a strand of human hair, it holds 1,024 electrodes, more than many of Precision’s competitors.
In the BCI world, more electrodes typically translates to greater accuracy, but the challenge is getting a large number of them in place without causing damage to the brain. Precision’s electrode array is thin enough that it can rest on the surface of the brain, just under the skull, which prevents the damage to brain tissue that can occur with BCIs that are implanted directly into the organ.
Precision’s implantation process is also designed to be less invasive than others. While most BCIs require surgeons to remove a bit of a patient’s skull, Precision’s array is thin enough to be slid onto the motor cortex of their brain through an incision less than 1 millimeter wide.
Precision hasn’t had to worry too much about the implantation process yet, though. So far, it has tested the Layer 7 Cortical Interface in 39 patients, and they were all undergoing brain surgery for other reasons, such as tumor removal, so surgeons just used whatever entryway they’d already created for those purposes to place the array.
They then had to remove the flexible device before the end of the surgery, but because many of the patients were awake and able to interact with their surgical teams during the procedures, Precision has been able to collect “an incredibly interesting treasure trove of data” during these short trials, according to Rapoport.
A major milestone
That treasure trove of data is about to get a lot bigger.
On April 17, Precision announced that the FDA had cleared the Layer 7 Cortical Interface for commercial use in patients for up to 30 days. That means the company can now sell the array to clinicians who want to use it to record, map, or even stimulate a patient’s brain both during surgery and as they are recovering.
This 30-day extension means Precision will be able to collect a lot more brain data, which is needed to develop the algorithms that translate users’ thoughts into commands for machines.
“Neural decoding algorithms, like all AI-driven products, rely on vast amounts of data,” Rapoport said in a press release. “This regulatory clearance will exponentially increase our access to diverse, high-quality data, which will help us to build BCI systems that work more effectively.”
“It’s been many years in the making.”
Craig Mermel
The FDA’s clearance also makes Precision the first company in this new wave of BCI developers to receive commercial approval from the government for any part of its system.
“It’s been said that the difference between a prototype and a product is like 100-fold in difficulty,” Rapoport told me. “I think something like that applies here. The field of brain-computer interfaces has been around in the scientific world for more than two decades, but this is one of the very first FDA clearances of any piece of that ecosystem.”
“It’s been many years in the making — to take a novel type of device and bring it through all of the rigorous safety and functional testing that’s required to achieve this clearance,” added Craig Mermel, Precision’s president and chief product officer.
Looking ahead
The FDA clearance may have given Precision the lead in the race to commercialization, but it hasn’t won yet. The Layer 7 Cortical Interface is just one part of its BCI, and several other groups are making swift progress in developing their own systems.
The aforementioned Neuralink recently sewed its tiny implant, which is about the size of five stacked quarters, directly into the motor cortex of a third patient, a nonverbal man with ALS. That person then used the system — and the Grok AI chatbot — to type using just his thoughts.
Another competitor, Synchron, backed by the investment firms of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, is developing its own minimally invasive BCI. It reaches the brain through a blood vessel, eliminating the need for any drilling of the skull. They’ve tested it in at least 10 people and have begun integrating ChatGPT into the device.
“We’re putting everything together. Integrating it, testing it, and working on future generations.”
Brian Otis
The next major milestone for Precision will be clinical trials testing a fully implanted system — Rapoport told me those will begin in 2026. The company is now preparing the device for the trials at its three US labs, including one in Santa Clara where a series of benchtop stress tests replicate the strain the strip will go through in the operating room during implantation.
“The device is very thin and flexible, so we need to make sure as it’s being handled in the operating room, the surgeon doesn’t actually break those very delicate traces,” said Mermel while showing me the tests. “This is one example of dozens of types of data we had to provide to the FDA as part of the 510(k) approval.”
“This is really where we’re doing a lot of the system integration of the new components that we’re inventing at our New York and Texas facilities,” added Brian Otis, Precision’s chief technology officer. “We’re putting everything together. Integrating it, testing it, and working on future generations.”
If everything goes as the Precision team hopes, it’ll emerge as the leader of the burgeoning BCI industry, a position that could not only make it a very profitable business, but also change the lives of millions of people living with paralysis — and maybe even let you send a text using just your thoughts one day.
Update, 5/13/25, 5:50 pm ET: This article was updated to correct the number of patients who have tested the Layer 7 Cortical Interface from 37 to 39.
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