2026: How high can the brain-computer interface soar in the spotlight?
「Key Points」
In 2026, brain-computer interface (BCI) has received sufficient capital and policy support. However, limited by technology, it still has a certain distance to go before large-scale clinical application.
In the game "Cyberpunk 2077", characters can freely remove their electronic prosthetics and seamlessly integrate their consciousness with machines. In the real world, the core technology to achieve this scenario is the brain-computer interface (BCI).
On April 10, 2026, the State Administration for Market Regulation approved and released a batch of important national standards covering emerging fields, work safety and other aspects, including those related to BCI.
Currently, this technology is no longer just a concept in the laboratory. Medical clinical applications have verified the rehabilitation effects of BCI on neurological diseases such as paralysis and epilepsy. Safety monitoring in industrial scenarios and consumer-grade sleep management are also being gradually implemented.
Both at home and abroad, "Brain-Computer Interface" has become the new favorite in the capital market.
Across the ocean, following Elon Musk's Neuralink, Science Corporation completed a $230 million Series C financing last month, with a valuation reaching $1.5 billion. Its developed Prima retinal implant has successfully helped about 40 blind patients regain their vision. In the domestic primary market for BCI, it is booming, and related concept stocks in the secondary market have repeatedly seen daily limit upsurges stimulated by favorable policies.
At the Zhongguancun Forum in March 2026, clinical experts from institutions such as Xuanwu Hospital and Tiantan Hospital shared the latest progress of BCI: Some products have been used to treat diseases such as movement disorders and aphasia, and some enterprises are verifying the possibility of its intervention in mental diseases such as insomnia and depression.
This development driven by technology, capital and policy is facing a crucial leap from the laboratory to commercial application. When science fiction becomes reality, is BCI ready for large-scale application?
Placebo or Killer App?
Recently, "Baobian" visited the BCI evaluation outpatient department at Peking Union Medical College Hospital. According to the doctor, the hospital is equipped with non-invasive BCI equipment for auxiliary treatment of epilepsy or motor function disorders caused by stroke, spinal cord injury, etc.
The patient wears a brain signal acquisition device. After the system captures the brain electrical signals, it drives a robotic arm to move the limb, promoting the reshaping of damaged neural pathways.
The patient needs to maintain a training frequency of once or twice a week, and the single - session cost is in the range of several hundred yuan. Clinical observations show that some patients who adhere to training have indeed improved in basic motor functions such as upper - limb grasping and arm - raising. However, the doctor admitted that the existing technology still has a long way to go before achieving a "cure".
It is worth noting that BCI has a low profile within the hospital. When "Baobian" inquired about the "BCI outpatient department" at the information desk and the nurse station, most of the staff said they were not clear about it.
Xuanwu Hospital, Tiantan Hospital, Huashan Hospital and other institutions have taken bigger steps. In early 2023, Xuanwu Hospital and the Tsinghua University team completed the world's first minimally invasive epidural BCI (NEO) implantation surgery.
A national multi - center clinical trial launched in May 2025 showed that 32 surgical subjects could control pneumatic gloves through the system, with a grasping accuracy rate of 92%.
Tiantan Hospital established the first domestic BCI clinical and translational ward in June 2025 and has completed multiple "Beinao No. 1" implantation surgeries, with a total of 7 surgeries completed so far.
Recently, the "China BCI Commercialization Outlook Report" jointly released by the Beijing Fourth - Wave Science and Technology Think Tank and the Zhongguancun Tiancheng Innovation Research Center predicts that the Chinese BCI market scale is expected to exceed 5 billion yuan in 2026 and maintain rapid growth; by 2030, the market scale is expected to exceed 15 billion yuan.
The global BCI market scale predicted by the market research institution Fortune Business Insights will grow from $296 million in 2026 to $961 million in 2034.
Currently, BCI is generally divided into two paths: invasive and non - invasive, with the difference being whether it breaks through the skull barrier to directly contact neural tissue. Invasive BCI implants electrodes into the cerebral cortex or subdural space, and the collected neural signal data is more accurate and detailed; non - invasive BCI wears a device outside the scalp to collect brain waves from the cerebral cortex through the skull.
Technically, invasive BCI was developed earlier and the technology is relatively mature, while most non - invasive products are still in the exploration stage.
In terms of invasive products, the United States is advancing faster. At the press conference in March 2026, Elon Musk announced the launch of the "Blindsight" project in the second quarter of 2026, which aims to help blind people regain visual perception by directly sending electrical signals to the visual cortex of the brain. The R1 surgical robot was also demonstrated at the conference, enabling "assembly - line" automated brain surgery.
In April 2026, Neuralink released a video. The protagonist in the video lost his language function due to "amyotrophic lateral sclerosis", but with the help of BCI technology, he was able to drive an external device to make sounds.
However, all of Neuralink's products are still in the research stage, have not been approved by the FDA, and are not on the market. This exposes the fact that although invasive products started early and have mature technology, implanting them into the human body will inevitably raise concerns about safety, which leads to difficulties in large - scale commercialization and approval.
Generally speaking, both routes have their own advantages and disadvantages: non - invasive BCI can be widely used in industrial and consumer fields, is easy to get approval but has relatively weak effects; invasive BCI has obvious effects and more mature technology, but it is difficult to address concerns about approval and safety.
Both the NEO system developed by Borui Kang Company and the "Beinao No. 1" developed by Beijing Xinzhida belong to semi - invasive epidural implantation. This shallow implantation sacrifices some safety for clinical acceptance and is suitable for large - scale promotion in the Chinese medical environment.
Stock Price, Financing Frenzy and Industrial Parks Ahead of Commercialization
BCI still has a long way to go before large - scale clinical application, but capital operation and industrial policies are already in place.
The year 2026 can be regarded as the watershed between the "year of mass production" and the "year of commercialization". Across the ocean, Neuralink's factory in Austin, Texas, has invested more than $16 million in expansion to prepare for large - scale production.
Behind the large - scale investment is the optimistic sentiment in the capital market. In June 2025, Neuralink completed a $650 million Series E financing, and its post - investment valuation soared to $9 billion. Although it has not yet achieved commercial revenue, with the subsequent standardized implantation of the R1 surgical robot, Neuralink may not only sell hardware but also build a subscription - based business model through cloud - based processing services for neural signals.
The enthusiasm on this side of the ocean is also high.
In the primary market, since BCI projects started to heat up last year, investment and financing activities in the first quarter of this year have been extremely active, and the valuations of popular projects have been constantly rising. The "China BCI Commercialization Outlook Report" shows that in the first three months of 2026, the total financing amount of BCI enterprises has exceeded that of the whole year of 2025.
Qiangnao Technology completed a 2 - billion - yuan financing at the beginning of the year. The investment lineup behind it includes IDG, Lens Technology, etc. This is also the highest - single - amount financing in the Chinese BCI industry so far.
At the Zhongguancun Forum on March 27, the Zhongguancun (Haidian) BCI Industrial Agglomeration Area was officially unveiled. Data shows that 27 core enterprises have gathered in Haidian District, Beijing, covering the entire chain from neural electrodes, implantable chips to algorithm decoding. According to the plan, by 2030, the agglomeration area will cultivate 100 innovative small and medium - sized enterprises and build a world - class "AI + BCI" industrial high - ground.
Fifteen landmark innovation achievements were also released at the Zhongguancun Forum, marking the crucial leap of technology from the laboratory to the clinic: the world's first approved implantable BCI hand motor function compensation system (Borui Kang), the "Beinao No. 2" (Xinzhida) that has entered the large - animal test stage, the stretchable flexible electrode (Zhiran Medical), and the perceptible brain pacemaker (Pinchi Medical), etc.
Among them, Borui Kang is also the first Chinese enterprise to have an approved implantable BCI product. Xu Honglai, the founder of Borui Kang, is a doctor in biomedical engineering from Tsinghua University and once worked in the Tsinghua University Neural Engineering Laboratory. Currently, the enterprise has completed the Series D+ financing.
"Beinao No. 2" is a product of Xinzhida. The company was established in 2023, jointly founded by the Beinao Fund (established by the Zhongguancun Development Group) and the Beijing Institute for Brain Science and Brain - like Intelligence (CIBR). It has developed two BCI products: the semi - invasive "Beinao No. 1" and the invasive "Beinao No. 2".
On the one hand, there are new technological advancements; on the other hand, there are difficulties in commercial implementation. The result for the domestic capital market is a roller - coaster ride for concept stocks with the disclosure of news.
One of the representative BCI concept stocks is Chuangxin Medical. Its subsidiary, Boling BCI, has a cooperation relationship with the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University. In early 2025, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University completed the first domestic closed - loop spinal nerve interface implantation surgery, and the stock price of Chuangxin Medical hit the daily limit on that day.
Then, in August 2025, January 2026, and March 2026, there were three pulse - like rises respectively. The reasons were the joint issuance of the "Implementation Opinions on Promoting the Innovative Development of the BCI Industry" by seven departments, Elon Musk's announcement of Neuralink's mass production, and the approval of the world's first invasive BCI medical device for the market.
After repeated fluctuations, the stock price of Chuangxin Medical has settled at around 25 yuan, 2.5 times that of a year ago. On the other hand, Chuangxin Medical and Boling BCI have been losing money for years, and their BCI products have not been officially launched.
The situation is similar for Sanbo Brain Hospital. Its stock price has risen by 50% in the past year. The co - founders of Sanbo Brain Hospital include three top neurosurgeons from Tiantan Hospital. In 2025, the Beijing Key Laboratory of Brain Science and BCI jointly built by Sanbo Brain Hospital was approved.
In addition, there are related concept stocks such as Yanshan Technology, Nanjing Panda, Seli Medical, Aipeng Medical, Entrobase Technology, Xiangyu Medical, and Weisi Medical, which have performed well in terms of stock price during the news disclosure period.
There are also those who "fish in troubled waters" in the frenzy.
In early January 2026, Yingjixin claimed on the interactive platform that its BCI chip "had been mass - produced and shipped" and its performance was comparable to that of overseas products. The regulatory authorities found that the chip was only in the market cultivation stage; Yahui Long disclosed that its cooperation partner had "both invasive and non - invasive technology paths" and "had orders", but in fact, the cooperation partner only had one prototype and no invasive technology.
The two companies were punished by the Shenzhen Securities Regulatory Bureau for misleading statements. Yingjixin was fined a total of 8 million yuan, and Yahui Long was fined a total of 7.5 million yuan.
Real - World Constraints of Hardware, Data and Ethics
It is normal for new technologies to have a combination of market expectations, real - world implementation and those who "fish in troubled waters". More importantly, is it fundamentally a good business? To know this, we need to look at the market.
The application fields of BCI seem to be very wide. In terms of application, the scenarios are shifting from the medical field, which has a rigid demand, to the industrial and consumer fields. Huanao Safety has embedded BCI into safety helmets and applied it to high - risk work scenarios such as power and mining, achieving a fatigue recognition accuracy rate of over 90%; the "Dream Warehouse" system of Maidong Shukang can extend the deep - sleep time by an average of 20% through audio - visual and light intervention.
In terms of efficiency improvement, the combination of BCI and large models is also worth looking forward to. Traditional BCI relies on pre - coded instruction sets and requires several weeks of calibration training for individuals. Large models are trying to adapt the trained decoding models to new patients by deeply learning the characteristics of massive neural signals. In the future, large models will promote the development of general pre - trained models for neural signals, enabling the system to have general learning ability with a small number of samples.
In addition, BCI still has several problems to solve.
At the hardware level, there is a ceiling for the technological advancement of invasive products. The glial scar caused by the immune response is the biggest bottleneck. Long - term implanted electrodes will be wrapped by scars, and the signal quality will decline year by year or even be completely lost; Neuralink's current 1024 - channel chip is already approaching the limit of the skull space, and a higher number of channels will face problems such as power supply, heat dissipation and implantation trauma.
At the data level, the lack of sample size restricts technological progress. The current clinical data is far less than the millions of samples required for imaging AI. It is worrying that neural data involves thinking privacy, and there are certain difficulties in building a database. Moreover, neural signals need to be interpreted frame by frame by neuroscientists, and the annotation cost is extremely high, further limiting the scale of the data set.
There are also ethical concerns in data collection: Data on motor recovery can be partially replaced by animal experiments, but data on language ability and other aspects can only rely on human data. How to obtain this data when large - scale use is not possible?
The commercialization of BCI still has a long way to go. The biocompatibility of hardware, data problems and the fuzzy ethical areas are all obstacles that must be overcome. When the enthusiasm of the capital market precedes the reality of technological implementation, the industry needs not only financing amounts and industrial parks, but also the patience of long - termism and respect for the essence of technology.
After all, understanding the brain is much more complicated than understanding financial statements.
This article is from the WeChat official account “Baobian” (ID: baobiannews), author: Zhang Jingwei, published by 36Kr with authorization.