Neuralink Rival Precision Neuroscience Raises $93 Million

(Bloomberg) — Precision Neuroscience Corp., a brain implant rival to Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp., has raised $93 million of a planned $100 million funding round, according to a person familiar with the situation. The deal valued the startup at about $500 million.

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The fresh fundraising gives the company a boost as it seeks to take on Neuralink, which has raised over $685 million, and other companies in the space including Science, which has raised $150 million.

A spokeswoman for Precision declined to comment. A Securities and Exchange Commission filing shows the company had filed to raise as much as $150 million.

Precision was founded in 2021 by neurosurgeon Ben Rapoport, a co-founder of Neuralink, and Chief Executive Officer Michael Mager. Last year, it raised $41 million.

Startups working on brain implants and related technology, or brain-machine interfaces, have gained considerable momentum in recent months. Neuralink’s device went into its first human patient as part of a trial earlier this year. And a team at the University of California, Davis, implanted an ALS patient with a device that allowed him to speak via a machine with unprecedented accuracy by reading his brain signals.

Precision’s device is called the Layer 7 Cortical Interface, referring to the six layers that comprise the cerebral cortex, and represents a compromise between invasive and noninvasive brain-computer interface technologies. It requires surgery and slicing into the skull, but not into the tissue of the brain. Instead, the device sits on top of the organ, a method the company says avoids damaging any of that brain’s tissue.

That’s a contrast with devices from companies including Blackrock Neurotech, Inbrain Neuroelectronics SL, Neuralink and Paradromics, which sit within brain tissue. A device from Synchron enters the brain like a stent, via blood vessels, and ultimately sits near the brain’s motor cortex. Another company, Science, says it’s working on devices that can sit both on or in brain tissue.

Precision’s device is not yet greenlit by regulators, but it is in testing. The startup has implanted its device in several patients, albeit temporarily during surgeries, where the primary purpose was related to another goal, such as removing brain tumors. While the surgery is underway and with the patient’s permission, the Precision team puts its Layer 7 in place and uses it to detect neurological signals.

The company has applied for Food and Drug Administration approval of a version of its device for temporary use for monitoring in hospital settings, and has said it hopes to have it on the market next year. That would provide a revenue stream to the fledgling company as it works on its other device: a permanent implant to treat paralysis. Such a device, if it works, is years from approval and commercial deployment.

In a recent surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Precision tested placing four of its microelectrode arrays — each one-fifth the thickness of a human hair — on the surface of a patient brain. Each array contains 1,024 electrodes, so deploying four arrays gives a total of 4,096, creating an unusually high level of detail. Competitors have far fewer. Neuralink’s device, for example, has 1,024 electrodes.