Raising more than 3 billion yuan in just one week, the financing of the brain-computer interface sector is surging sharply. What exactly do capital players look for when they "inspect the goods"?

Within one week, four large-scale financings have been completed in the brain-computer interface track, with the total amount exceeding 3 billion yuan.

On November 4, Shanghai Active Technology announced the completion of a 464 million-yuan Angel+ round of financing; on November 3, Nuannxinjia completed a 500 million-yuan C+ round of financing; at the end of October, BrainCo Technology finished a 700 million-yuan Series B financing; Ladder Medical also disclosed that it had completed approximately 1.4 billion yuan of financing in the second half of 2026, and launched IPO counseling on November 2.

In just a few days, successive large financing progress has emerged in the brain-computer interface track. However, if we observe these enterprises together, we can find that the financing scale is expanding, and the criteria for capital to select enterprises are also changing.

Hua Ran, medical device industry analyst at CSC Financial, told The 4th Wave that early-stage investment in the brain-computer interface track was mostly based on team background, technical routes and scientific research achievements. But as enterprises enter the stages of human clinical trials, registration clinical trials and product engineering, investors can begin to evaluate the preliminary functional performance of the system, potential patient benefits and subsequent transformation risks more specifically based on human research and product engineering progress.

Large-scale Financing: What Is Capital Focusing On?

Since the beginning of this year, large-scale financings in the brain-computer interface field are not limited to leading enterprises that have entered the clinical stage.

Active Technology is a quite typical example. This company was established only in February this year, incubated by Lingang Laboratory. It completed a 330 million-yuan Angel round of financing in August, and secured another 464 million-yuan Angel+ round in November, with the total amount of the two rounds of financing reaching nearly 800 million yuan.

From the publicly available technical layout, Active Technology does not only bet on a single application. The company has built full-link R&D capabilities covering flexible electrodes, dedicated chips, neural signal codec algorithms and system integration, and has laid out three product lines for movement, vision and emotion at the same time.

Hua Ran believes that Active Technology's access to large-scale financing is related to its platform-oriented positioning and product layout. On the one hand, the company covers multiple links from electrodes, chips, algorithms to implantation systems, and has full-process engineering capabilities; on the other hand, it has laid out directions such as vision in addition to movement, which expands the imagination space for technology and applications.

This also explains why an enterprise with a relatively short establishment history can still obtain large-scale capital investment. Capital is not only betting on the current clinical progress of the enterprise, but also on the existing scientific research accumulation of the team, technical platform and future product development capabilities.

But this does not mean that capital has returned to the stage where it only focuses on technical concepts. The 700 million-yuan Series B financing of BrainCo Technology will be used for multi-center registered clinical trials, registration declaration, mass production construction and next-generation product R&D; when disclosing the financing progress, Ladder Medical also simultaneously announced the progress of clinical implantation and multi-center registered clinical trials. The use of financing has obviously extended beyond the laboratory.

For invasive brain-computer interface enterprises, developing a set of prototypes is only the beginning. After that, they still need to go through clinical trials, long-term follow-up visits, system reliability verification, medical device registration, as well as training and patient services after the products enter hospitals. Sustained investment is required in every link.

Hua Ran mentioned that in the past, the financing obtained by enterprises might be mainly used for laboratory R&D and prototype production; now the funds also need to cover clinical trials, long-term follow-up, reliability verification, and even hospital training after listing. The increase in the amount of a single round of financing is also related to the development stage of the enterprise and the change in the use of funds.

In addition to medical and hard technology investment institutions, state-owned capital platforms and industrial capital are also entering this field. For fields with long R&D cycles and complex industrial chains such as brain-computer interface, different investors have different perspectives of concern, and state-owned capital platforms and industrial capital will also pay attention to supply chain cooperation, manufacturing capacity and industrial resource coordination.

Several recent financings also correspond to different investment logics. Active Technology reflects the early-stage investment opportunities brought by scientific research accumulation, platform capabilities and multi-product lines; enterprises such as BrainCo, Ladder Medical and Nuannxinjia have already needed large-scale funds to support clinical verification and industrialization construction.

Leading Enterprises Are Accelerating, Do Latecomers Still Have Opportunities?

The expansion of financing scale is also changing the competitive landscape of the industry. For enterprises that have entered the clinical stage, first-mover advantages are accumulating. Human body data, long-term implantation experience, clinical partner hospitals, registration declaration experience, and product engineering capabilities all require time and capital to precipitate.

Hua Ran believes that if a new brain-computer interface enterprise only follows the technical routes that have been laid out by enterprises such as Ladder Medical and BrainCo, investors may hardly find new reasons for investment. After all, existing enterprises have invested for many years and accumulated corresponding technical and clinical experience.

Latecomers do not completely lose their opportunities, for example, new technical routes, indications that have not yet been solved, or better solutions proposed for existing indications. Even if clinical verification has not been completed, as long as a well-founded differentiated solution can be proposed and the team can prove that it has the ability to promote verification and transformation, there is still a chance to obtain capital support.

This shows that the financing window of the brain-computer interface industry has not been closed, but the threshold is rising for latecomers that lack differentiated capabilities.

After capital selection becomes more specific, the competition between enterprises will increasingly focus on practical issues: whether signal acquisition is accurate, whether decoding latency can be reduced, whether long-term implantation can remain stable, and whether the same system can achieve relatively consistent effects on different patients.

In particular, for invasive brain-computer interfaces, long-term stability is always an unavoidable problem. After the electrode is implanted, tissue encapsulation and scarring may occur, which will further affect the signal quality. Some enterprises propose to improve biocompatibility through methods such as mesh electrodes and drug-coated electrodes, but these new solutions still require clinical verification.

The number of clinical cases also needs to be viewed rationally. At present, enterprises often take the number of implants and the number of clinical enrolled patients as progress indicators for external display. Enterprises need enough cases to verify safety and effectiveness when carrying out registered clinical trials, but the number of cases itself cannot directly prove that the technology is mature, let alone simply deduce that the product can be stably replicated in more patients.

The brain-computer interface industry has received high public attention, and patients also have strong expectations for restoring motor, language and even visual functions. But for patients, what really matters are surgical risks, the degree of functional improvement, long-term use effects, and how to deal with product failures. For the industry, beyond the capital boom, clinical evidence, patient benefits and commercialization closed loop are the more long-term examination questions.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "The 4th Wave", written by Bai Yan, and published with authorization from 36Kr.