The brain-computer interface craze is red-hot, the founder says: Investors are meeting me at a rate of 5,000 yuan per hour
The enthusiasm of capital has been a source of frustration for Li Xiaojian, founder of NeuroX Medical.
“I generally don’t meet with investors these days. If I do, I charge 5000 yuan per hour,” Li Xiaojian said. The company has already secured confirmed investors, and furthermore, he believes many institutions do not truly understand brain-computer interface (BCI) technology—they only come to “learn” under the guise of making investments.
NeuroX Medical is far from the only case. Economic Observer has learned that numerous BCI companies including Vision BCI, NeuroRise Medical, NeoMotion Tech, SoftMind Tech, CoreNeuro, and Haitian Intelligent have all been highly sought after by capital this year.
Guo Yudong, Deputy Director of the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industry Division at the Beijing Future Science Park Administrative Committee, who has long-term experience working with enterprises and investors, has observed that since 2026, financing in the BCI sector has been exceptionally hot. Almost every BCI enterprise in the park has received visits from investors. In stark contrast, other medical and health sectors have been relatively quiet, with many companies struggling to secure funding.
In 2024, Heyin Capital established the country’s first dedicated BCI industrial fund, with an initial size of 1 billion yuan. Recently, Heyin Capital has also been liaising with local governments across multiple regions to participate in setting up BCI-focused funds.
Zhang Yutao, Partner of the Heyin BCI Fund, has found that investors in the BCI field are no longer limited to medical funds. Starting from this year, a significant number of industrial and technology funds have entered the market. Technology funds often do not regard BCI (especially invasive BCI) as a purely medical product, but recognize the enormous potential for BCI to expand across the entire technology landscape in the future. This is a key reason why many invasive BCI companies have secured high valuations.
As the capital market booms, the number of BCI enterprises is also surging. Before 2026, industry reports indicated there were roughly 280 BCI-related enterprises in China. Zhang Yutao estimates that the current number far exceeds that earlier statistic. Data from Tianyancha shows that there are currently more than 350 BCI-related enterprises in China.
01
Inflection Point
Over the past year, more than 100 investment institutions have reached out to Vision BCI. The company’s main goal is to use BCI technology to restore basic vision for blind people. In March 2026, after the release of the 15th Five-Year Plan Outline, the company’s popularity rose even further. At its peak, founder Liu Bing had to meet with several groups of investors in a single day.
Over the past year, the company’s valuation has multiplied several times, and it is currently undergoing a large-scale financing round. Liu Bing said, “The intended investment amount for this round far exceeds our actual needs, so we can only turn down most institutions.”
This level of excitement was something Liu Bing could never have imagined when he first started his business two years ago. Back then, investors were relatively cautious about the BCI sector, and even more wary of vision reconstruction, with many believing the direction was too challenging.
Sun Yu, founder of SoftMind Tech, has also witnessed the entire journey of BCI from being completely ignored to being chased by capital. SoftMind Tech is a company focused on invasive BCI, with core R&D directions in nanoelectronic BCI technology designed to address sleep disorders. In 2017, Sun Yu was running a technology consulting firm in the United States, and occasionally domestic entrepreneurs and investors would reach out to consult about BCI. At that time, in the eyes of many, BCI was still science fiction. When Sun Yu tried to explain the possibilities of combining nanomaterials with BCI, most people thought it sounded like a fantasy.
Now the tide has completely turned.
Sun Yu describes this change as: 10 years ago, the BCI industry was like the sun at 4 a.m., but now it has risen to 9 a.m. He revealed that SoftMind Tech completed a small-scale financing round two months ago, and has now started preparing for a larger subsequent round.
Recently, Sun Yu has been meeting with people almost every week, with up to a dozen groups of visitors in a single busy week. Visitors include not only investment institutions, but also local governments, listed companies, and entrepreneurs from traditional industries. They come with different intentions: local governments hope to attract investment, listed companies want to use the BCI concept to raise their profile in the capital market, financial investors focus on capital appreciation, and traditional entrepreneurs hope to redirect their existing capital into new industries.
Beijing CoreNeuro Neural Technology Co., Ltd. is a leading Chinese enterprise in semi-invasive and invasive BCI. As a state-controlled company, it has not yet reached the stage of market-oriented financing, but many investment institutions have already taken the initiative to approach it. Li Yuan, Board Secretary of CoreNeuro, believes that the 2026 financing boom is underpinned by policy and industry inflection points. On the policy front, BCI was included in the 15th Five-Year Plan Outline as one of the six future industries. In March, the National Medical Products Administration approved the world’s first semi-invasive BCI for market launch, a milestone event.
On July 13, this world’s first semi-invasive BCI completed its first global surgery at Huashan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University. Its developer, BrainCo, is currently applying for listings on both the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
As a capital market participant, Zhang Yutao has seen tangible breakthroughs in the industry: significant improvements in the signal decoding accuracy and system integration capabilities of non-invasive deep brain control, as well as in the multimodal fusion of brain science technologies.
Huang Jinglu, Investment Vice President at Legend Capital, recalls that when she first began researching BCI in 2023, there were still many uncertainties, including regulatory attitudes, technical stability, and clinical surgical methods. Back then, the general view was that BCI was a promising technology—“a small opening in the mountain where light seems to peek through,” leading to a hidden “paradise” beyond—but it was still unclear when that “mountain gate” would be fully opened.
Three years later, the certainty surrounding BCI has grown significantly. Semi-invasive BCI has been approved, invasive BCI has entered clinical trial stages, and product registration certificates may be obtained before 2028. “The focus has shifted from wondering three or four years ago whether such a device could be implanted in the human brain, to figuring out how to implement it in a high-quality, safe, stable, and reliable manner.” Huang Jinglu believes that BCI has gradually moved from the stage of scientific exploration to clinical and industrial transformation, and in the future, BCI may become as accessible as consumer electronics.
02
Queuing to Invest
An investor at a well-known investment institution began systematically researching BCI two years ago. Over the past year, he has reviewed dozens of BCI projects that he could access. He says everyone is now scrambling for projects. Anyone who has worked at a leading BCI company or has overseas BCI experience will find numerous institutions proactively reaching out as soon as they start their own business. Many companies have not finished their current financing round, yet investors for the next round are already lining up.
He himself once missed out on a high-quality enterprise. In the first half of 2025, he had planned to invest in the company, but by the time the funds were in place, the company’s valuation had multiplied several times, and he ultimately could not participate. “Many projects have seen their valuations rise fivefold or tenfold in a year, leaving a large number of investment institutions unable to get in.”
This level of enthusiasm stands in stark contrast to the innovative drug and AI pharmaceutical tracks he follows. In the primary market, many investors are no longer willing to look at early-stage projects focused on bispecific antibodies or small-molecule drugs. Even ADC (antibody-drug conjugate) projects, which have received relatively high attention, are far less popular than BCI.
He also finds that different investors have different priorities. Medical investors pay more attention to the long-term stability, safety, and clinical pathways of BCI—for example, whether the implanted device can be removed later, or if it will cause brain damage. Technology investors, by contrast, focus more on market potential, believing that many technical issues will gradually be resolved as the industry develops, making them more active in investing in invasive BCI.
Zhang Yutao has noticed a divergence in the current capital market: the BCI projects favored by investors are mostly concentrated in the invasive and non-invasive deep brain control fields, where enterprises are seeing successive financing rounds that are often oversubscribed. In comparison, consumer-grade BCI enterprises have not enjoyed the same level of excitement.
In this booming track, founders are now selecting their investors. Many institutions hope to arrange meetings with Li Xiaojian, but he usually first checks their backgrounds before deciding whether to meet them. Even if an institution explicitly expresses interest in investing, if it is only chasing trends or telling stories, he will directly reject them, or charge for the meeting in the form of technical consulting. “If the other party doesn’t understand the industry, how can I be sure their investment won’t become a hidden problem?”
This caution is not unfounded. In recent years, Li Xiaojian has frequently encountered situations where investors and the founding team have mismatched understandings. Many investors keep comparing the company to Elon Musk’s Neuralink, expecting the company to advance projects according to their ideas, leaving Li Xiaojian exhausted from explaining with little effect. He has also seen friends’ companies forced to accept terms like investor veto power due to harsh early financing environments, leading to deadlocked decision-making and operational stagnation.
03
Is It Overheated?
When talking to peers, the aforementioned investor from the well-known investment institution finds that many people cannot clearly explain why BCI is so popular, why valuations keep rising, or what the real future application scenarios are. Even so, many still choose to invest. “Many people invest even if they don’t fully understand the sector—some are driven by policy guidance, some by LP (limited partner) requirements, and others are truly optimistic about the technology.”
“Currently, state-owned capital remains the main force in BCI investment,” he says. State-owned capital follows policy directions, and many institutions need to deploy at least one or two BCI enterprises, but the number of truly investable companies is limited, naturally concentrating funds on a small number of projects.
After interacting with more than 300 companies, Zhang Yutao found that high-quality enterprises are scarce assets. His criteria for judging a high-quality enterprise include whether it has self-developed technology (and is not just an assembly company), and whether its products address real market demand rather than being purely research-focused or pseudo-demand. He and his team have encountered many assembly companies that only have an open-source solution and no core patents, as well as some companies that are still at the PPT concept stage with no solid foundation.
Sun Yu has seen many enterprises seizing the opportunity to raise funds to catch this capital window, while some companies that originally had nothing to do with BCI have begun to repackage themselves using the BCI concept. He has a friend who rebranded a massage chair company as a BCI enterprise.
Zhang Haiyan, Chairwoman of Haitian Intelligent, has also observed that more and more people are using the BCI concept for marketing. For example, some medical device salespeople promote unrelated products under the BCI banner, or even claim to build BCI wards, but have no real products to offer. “They treat BCI as a prop to establish connections with hospitals, essentially riding the wave of popularity.”
Multiple interviewees believe that based on valuations, parts of the industry are currently overheated.
“The valuations of BCI projects this year have seen tremendous growth. If we only treat BCI as a medical device, the current valuations are indeed very high,” Li Yuan says. The current high valuations are not only based on clinical applications, but also take into account the future potential of human-machine integration and human enhancement.
Li Xiaojian is more blunt, believing that some capital chasing BCI is more like participating in a “pass-the-parcel” game. “They want the company to quickly expand its story and push up valuations so they can exit easily. But if the expected results cannot be delivered in the end, who will clean up the mess?” Therefore, as BCI becomes a hot track for capital, he has become more selective than ever before.
NeuroX Medical’s last public financing round was in 2023, when it completed a tens of millions of yuan angel+ round. Li Xiaojian revealed that the company is about to close its Series A round, which will mainly introduce medical industry funds, and will no longer accept pure financial investment. He hopes partners can truly understand the development rules of the medical industry and provide industrial resources, channels, and product promotion capabilities, rather than expecting the company to obtain product licenses, go public, and deliver a quick exit in a short period of time.
Compared with technology investors, Li Xiaojian prefers to communicate with investment institutions that have a medical background. In his view, some technology investors lack basic knowledge of brain science, making them more likely to treat scientific hypotheses as realistic paths.
Zhang Yutao predicts that in 2 to 3 years, the partial high valuation bubble in the BCI sector may be burst. From the market perspective, although BCI has opened up vast potential, the underlying scientific mechanisms of many BCI application products have not yet been verified, and some may be falsified in the future. Furthermore, BCI is a highly interdisciplinary field combining medicine and engineering, and no single technical highlight can solve all problems. From the capital perspective, with the release of Document No. 54 (the Guiding Opinions of the General Office of the State Council on Strengthening Supervision, Preventing Risks, and Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Private Equity Fund Industry), local government investment will shrink to a certain extent in the future. As liquidity declines, enterprises with existing valuation bubbles will return to their true value.
04
Generation Gap and Advantages
In Huang Jinglu’s view, Elon Musk’s Neuralink was the first to show the world that flexible invasive BCI can capture high-quality, high-throughput neuronal signals to achieve advanced brain control. The upper limit of this technology is extremely high, and its future applications are not limited to serious medical scenarios, but can also extend into a wide range of technology fields. This is the real reason why capital is so fascinated by the sector.
Neuralink has long been the benchmark for invasive BCI companies worldwide. Its products can reach 1024 channels, while Chinese enterprises are currently focusing on 128-channel and 256-channel products, creating a certain generation gap. On July 1, Neuralink released a video of minimally invasive implantation through dural puncture, changing the traditional surgical approach from “dural incision” to “dural puncture,” which significantly reduces invasive surgical trauma and shortens operation time, once again innovating the track.
In addition to downstream BCI products, the upstream core components—electrodes, chips, and algorithms—are also key to competition. Zhang Yutao says that Chinese companies currently have very little gap with foreign counterparts in electrodes and algorithms, and the main gap lies in BCI chips.
Currently, most high-throughput BCIs in clinical stages in China use imported chips. Li Yuan says domestic BCI chips are in the early stages of industrialization, and their performance parameters and production yields still need time to be verified.
Chinese enterprises also have their own innovations.
On July 12, Song Qi, founder of NeuroRise Medical, introduced at the Zhongguancun (Changping) 2026 Brain Science and BCI Innovation Forum that three weeks after Neuralink’s product was implanted in its first human subject, 85% of its electrode threads detached from the brain tissue. Electrode detachment not only directly reduces the number of collected brain neural signals and decoding accuracy, but may also cause inflammatory reactions in brain tissue, posing challenges to the long-term stable use of invasive BCI in clinical scenarios.
To address this issue, NeuroRise Medical drew inspiration from traditional Chinese paper-cutting art to develop stretchable flexible electrodes, reducing the tensile force of the entire electrode to 1% of that of Neuralink’s electrodes—approximately 40 microNewtons, far less than the adhesion force of the electrodes to the brain tissue, ensuring the electrodes remain stable inside the brain.
Song Qi believes that the gap between Chinese and foreign BCI companies is gradually narrowing. Initially, many of NeuroRise Medical’s components had to be sourced externally, and customizing parts abroad would typically take half a year at very high costs. Now, relying on China’s increasingly complete industrial chain and rich clinical resources, he is very confident that in the next three to five years, domestic original technologies in the invasive BCI field will reach internationally leading levels.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Economic Observer", written by Zhang Ying and Zhang Ling, and published with authorization by 36Kr.