Alibaba invests in a post-90s female doctor and plans for brain-computer interface.

When Elon Musk's Neuralink officially announced 2026 as the "Year of Mass Production", the domestic brain-computer interface (BCI) track witnessed a significant capital move.

On March 13th, Shanghai Jieti Medical Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Jieti Medical) announced the completion of a strategic financing of 500 million yuan. The investment was led by Alibaba, with SDIC Venture Capital Co., Ltd. following suit. Existing shareholders such as Tencent, Yuanlai Capital, OrbiMed, Yuanhe Origin, Qiming Venture Partners, Lilly Asia Ventures, Source Code Capital, and Shanghai SDIC Leading Fund also continued to participate.

So far, Jieti Medical has accumulated a total financing of over 1.1 billion yuan in the past year.

It is worth mentioning that this is also the first enterprise in this field invested in by Alibaba and Tencent, reflecting the ambition of these tech giants to layout the next-generation human-computer interaction infrastructure.

A Returnee Female Doctor Leads the Team to Face the Global Technological High Point

The entrepreneurial story of Jieti Medical began with the encounter of two young scientists. Its core founder, Li Xue, is a returnee entrepreneur. She graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology with a bachelor's degree. From 2016 to 2020, she studied at the School of Biomedical Engineering of the University of Texas at Austin and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Rice University in the United States, successfully obtaining master's and doctoral degrees from both universities.

In 2020, after completing her studies, Li Xue chose to return to China and worked at the Brain Intelligence Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was here that she met Zhao Zhengtao, who was also a key scientific researcher. Based on their common scientific research ideals and industrial aspirations, Li Xue and Zhao Zhengtao founded Jieti Medical in 2021.

In terms of the technical route, Jieti Medical chose the invasive technical route, which is the same as that of Musk's Neuralink. Zhao Zhengtao explained that for BCI, from non-invasive, semi-invasive to invasive, the technical difficulty gradually increases, and so does the application value. "From the very beginning, we at Jieti Medical hoped to solve the most difficult and most valuable problems."

In just a few years, Jieti Medical has mastered a number of globally leading technologies, including electrodes, systems, algorithms, and surgical robots. The company has independently developed ultra-flexible electrodes that are 1/100 the thickness of a hair and the world's smallest wireless BCI implant. In 2025, it completed the first domestic prospective clinical trial of invasive BCI and its products entered the "Green Channel" for innovation of the National Medical Products Administration.

In 2026, the clinical progress of Jieti Medical continued to accelerate. At the beginning of the year, relying on the surgical robot independently developed by the company, Jieti Medical successfully completed the clinical implantation of the 256-channel wireless high-throughput invasive BCI system (WRS02) to be registered, and the brain-controlled interaction function was effectively verified.

According to the plan, the company plans to conduct large-scale multi-center registration clinical trials in the middle of 2026 and complete the enrollment and implantation surgeries of about 40 patients within the year. By the end of 2026, the total number of clinical implantations of Jieti Medical is expected to approach or even exceed the current total number of clinical trials of Neuralink under Musk (currently about 21 cases), marking that Chinese BCI enterprises are sprinting towards the leading position in the global commercialization and clinical implementation process.

Alibaba's Debut in the BCI Track

This leading investment is Alibaba's first direct move in the BCI field. Before this, Alibaba's participation mainly remained at the level of ecological cooperation - exploring this cutting-edge track through technical cooperation or indirect investment.

Alibaba Cloud once cooperated with Zhentai Intelligence at the algorithm platform level. Zhentai Intelligence is a startup focusing on the BCI rehabilitation field. Wang Haochong, the founder of Zhentai Intelligence, said, "Currently, the company is building a more powerful underlying system architecture for the BCI system, which requires the support of a powerful cloud computing platform. In the future, we will also continue to discuss cooperation with Alibaba Cloud to promote the implementation of BCI technology. This requires the support of more R & D forces to jointly explore the mysterious brain. We hope to establish links and cooperation with more enterprises in the fields of smart communities and smart healthcare through Alibaba Cloud."

This is exactly Alibaba's typical approach before: instead of direct investment, it uses cloud computing, large models, and computing power as the fulcrum to provide infrastructure support for BCI startups. Alibaba Cloud's technical accumulation in the fields of multi-modal large models, computing power, and intelligent hardware makes it naturally suitable for the role of an enabler.

A similar layout is also reflected in the actions of Ant Group. In July 2025, Ant Group's cutting-edge technology platform "Ant Afu" invested 1.5 billion yuan in Diany Diagnostic. At the same time, it systematically integrated Ant's accumulation in artificial intelligence, big data analysis, and BCI underlying technology with Diany Diagnostic's medical testing network, clinical data resources, and medical application scenarios.

The emergence of Jieti Medical has given Alibaba the opportunity to enter the underlying operating system of the next-generation human-computer interaction. Invasive BCI naturally requires the support of large models, computing power, and terminal ecological carriers, which are exactly Alibaba's advantages.

Li Xue, the founder, said, "BCI is not only a medical technology but also the ultimate integration of life science and information technology." She believes that "the deep accumulation of large enterprises in multi-modal large models, computing power, intelligent hardware, and ecological deployment can be deeply integrated with Jieti Medical's globally leading BCI underlying hardware barrier advantages and clinical transformation experience in the future."

The financing of Jieti Medical is not an isolated case but a microcosm of the collective explosion of the Chinese BCI industry. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the industry witnessed intensive actions:

At the end of January, Qiangnao Technology submitted an IPO application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in a confidential manner. In February, Shuli Innovation, a BCI technology enterprise, announced the completion of a Series C financing. In the same month, Zhiran Medical, an invasive BCI company, announced the completion of a Series A+ financing of 300 million yuan. On March 12th, Gestalt Technology, a domestic hard technology enterprise focusing on ultrasonic BCI, announced the completion of a 150 million yuan angel round financing...

With the in - depth participation of large enterprises such as Alibaba and Tencent, the domestic BCI industry is bidding farewell to the early stage of "single - combat" and entering a new stage of coordinated development of "technology + capital + ecosystem". In this technological game related to the future human - machine relationship, Jieti Medical, in which Alibaba has placed its bet, may become the key force for China to overtake on the curve in this global technological competition.

This article is from the WeChat official account “Lieyun Selection”. Author: Han Wenjing. Republished by 36Kr with permission.