A New Neurotech Startup Launches to Rival Sam Altman’s Merge Labs — SkimNews
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- Bridge Neurotech launched with $13.5 million in funding, including from General Catalyst, to build a non-invasive brain-computer interface using ultrasound.
- Founder Will Biederman developed the chip Neuralink licensed to use in its first devices during his PhD work, but split off because he believes non-invasive devices can reach far more people than implants.
- Bridge Neurotech began an observational clinical study in Redwood City, California, placing a small ultrasound probe on healthy adults' heads to record brain activity during listening, watching, moving, and speaking.
- The probe uses silicon chips from Butterfly Network and sits on the temporal window above the ear, which Biederman described as "something close to headphones."
- Both Bridge Neurotech and Merge Labs trace back to Arbor Neuroscience, a nonprofit previously known as Forest Neurotech that Biederman co-founded in 2023.
- University of Southern California neuroengineer Maryam Shanechi warned that ultrasound's indirect measurement of blood flow creates a natural delay of a few seconds, which could limit real-time tasks like controlling a robotic limb — Bridge plans to use predictive AI models to address the lag.
Why it matters: Only about 100 people worldwide have received implanted brain-computer interfaces, partly because neurosurgery's risks are hard to justify for most users. Bridge's non-invasive ultrasound bet could dramatically expand the addressable market — but the multi-second signal delay Shanechi flagged means the company is betting on AI to close a gap that competing surgical systems don't face.
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