Neuracle IPO: Standing at the Intersection of Technological Conviction and Financial Reality

In June 2026, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Sci-Tech Innovation Board welcomed a highly distinctive and widely discussed hard-tech enterprise — BrainCo Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. (referred to as "BrainCo" hereinafter).

As a leading player in the domestic brain-computer interface sector, BrainCo has drawn significant market attention for its core invasive product being granted the "world's first certification". However, the flip side of the coin is that, with zero revenue generated from the company's core products during the reporting period, BrainCo has proposed a massive fundraising plan of 2.5 billion yuan. 

Meanwhile, on July 1, 2026, BrainCo was selected by the Securities Association of China for on-site inspection of its initial public offering application. This highly penetrating regulatory move has added a degree of uncertainty to its listing journey. Faced with the stark contrast between its scarce market prestige and actual operational performance, will BrainCo be able to smoothly cross the threshold of the capital market?  

01 Performance Considerations Behind the Scarcity

Looking back at BrainCo's development history, its strong academic background and technical barriers have formed the company's core competitive moat. According to the prospectus, BrainCo was founded in 2011, and its two founders, XU Honglai and HUANG Xiaoshan, both came from the domestic brain-computer interface hub — the Neural Engineering Laboratory of Tsinghua University. 

This pure "Tsinghua-origin" lineage has given BrainCo a distinct first-mover advantage in underlying algorithm analysis and weak signal detection, which may also be the technical foundation that allowed the company to break the foreign monopoly on high-end scientific research electroencephalogram equipment in its early stages. 

In terms of technical path selection, BrainCo has adopted a relatively robust "minimally invasive (semi-invasive)" solution that takes into account industrial implementation. Compared with the more aggressive "cortical puncture" approach of overseas giant Neuralink, BrainCo's NEO platform places electrodes outside the dura mater, which not only ensures a high signal-to-noise ratio of brain electrical signals, but also effectively avoids the clinical risks of foreign body reactions and brain tissue damage. 

This strategy that balances safety and performance led to BrainCo's core product NEO-ONE SCI (Implantable Brain-Computer Interface Hand Motor Function Compensation System) being officially approved for marketing by the National Medical Products Administration on March 13, 2026, making it the world's first approved invasive brain-computer interface medical device. 

However, in sharp contrast to this highly scarce "world's first certification", there is a structural mismatch presented in the company's financial performance. The prospectus shows that BrainCo achieved revenue of about 108 million yuan in 2025, but almost all of this revenue came from non-invasive scientific research equipment (such as electroencephalogram acquisition systems), while the highly anticipated invasive core product contributed zero revenue to the company during the reporting period. 

This model of "relying on scientific research equipment to support cash flow and leveraging invasive products to boost valuation" has directly led to continuous pressure on the company's net profit. From 2023 to 2025, BrainCo accumulated a total loss of 328 million yuan, and its undistributed net profit was -467 million yuan by the end of 2025. 

Objectively speaking, a gross profit margin as high as 70%-80% has confirmed BrainCo's pricing power in the scientific research equipment field, but in the most critical invasive track, the company still faces fierce competition from peers such as BrainCo, which focuses on non-invasive (consumer-side) products. Who will be the first to complete a large-scale commercial closed loop and gain industry pricing power, and how to convert high technical barriers into real commercial revenue, may still be an unsolved problem for BrainCo. 

02 Capital Game of the 5 Billion Yuan Valuation Bet

In the brain-computer interface track, which features a long cycle and high investment, the escort support of capital is indispensable. Sorting out BrainCo's financing history, we can clearly see a curve of the company's valuation expanding at an accelerating pace. 

Since its angel round financing in 2015, BrainCo has not only received continuous capital injections from leading institutions such as HSG, Baidu Ventures, and Songhe Capital, but also introduced a number of heavyweight state-owned and local industrial funds, including China Merchants China Investment, Pudong Venture Capital, and Shanghai State-owned Investment, intensively during its Series D and Pre-IPO rounds from the end of 2024 to the end of 2025. 

The star-studded shareholder camp has provided BrainCo with abundant industrial resources, but it has also brought strict capital constraints. The prospectus reveals that in October 2025, BrainCo signed a valuation adjustment agreement with relevant investors featuring "upgraded" clauses. The agreement not only requires the company to complete its listing before December 31, 2028, but also sets a strict valuation threshold: BrainCo's IPO issuance valuation must not be lower than 5 billion yuan, and the total amount of funds raised must not be less than 500 million yuan. If the requirements are not met as scheduled, the repurchase obligation of the founding shareholders will automatically resume. 

Although this valuation adjustment agreement has undergone a nominal "clean-up" before the IPO application was submitted, its "conditional resumption" clause remains valid. From a commercial logic perspective, the emergence of such valuation adjustment agreements to a certain extent reflects the bottom-line demands of state-owned capital that entered the market in the later stage for "maintaining and increasing the value of state-owned assets" and investment safety cushions. In the last round of financing at the end of 2025, BrainCo's post-investment valuation had reached 4 billion yuan, and the investors' requirement that the IPO valuation should not be lower than 5 billion yuan is essentially to lock in a premium space of about 25% in the secondary market. 

However, from the perspective of secondary market investors, an enterprise with annual revenue just exceeding 100 million yuan and no breakthrough in sales of its core products needs to support a valuation of 5 billion yuan, which means its static price-to-sales ratio (P/S) will be as high as about 46 times. 

Moreover, of the 2.5 billion yuan BrainCo plans to raise this time, more than 1.54 billion yuan (accounting for 61.6%) will continue to be invested in brain-computer interface research and development, and 550 million yuan will be used to supplement working capital. However, against the background that the company already has 670 million yuan in cash reserves on its books, such a huge fundraising "appetite" seems somewhat mismatched with its current net asset size, which may also trigger rational discussions in the market about whether there is "excessive financing". At a time when the valuation of the secondary market is accelerating to return to rationality, it remains uncertain whether this high issue price can effectively obtain institutional subscriptions. 

03 Survival Test of Commercial Implementation

As a not-yet-profitable hard-tech enterprise, BrainCo is applying for listing on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board using the fifth set of listing standards. This opens the door to the capital market for the company, but at the same time sets a clear "life-and-death line" for its performance. 

According to the relevant rules of the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, if an enterprise listed under the fifth set of standards still fails to turn a profit by the fourth full fiscal year after listing, and its revenue is less than 100 million yuan, it will directly face delisting risks. 

Looking back at the development history of comparable companies, such as Allist Pharmaceuticals (688578.SH), which successfully achieved performance reversal through the increased sales of its core new drug; while enterprises like MicroPort Robotics (02252.HK) experienced a long period of financial pain in the early stage of commercialization. For BrainCo, this means that the company must complete the sales growth of its core invasive products from zero to hundreds of millions of yuan within a time window of less than four years in the future, so as to get rid of the revenue structure that relies solely on scientific research equipment. 

However, from the industrial law of innovative medical devices, this commercialization process faces multiple challenges. The first is the extremely high barriers to hospital admission and promotion. The unit price of BrainCo's invasive product is as high as hundreds of thousands of yuan, and the surgical process involves precise neurosurgical minimally invasive operations, which imposes extremely high requirements on the hospital's infrastructure, the training of doctors in operation skills, and the acceptance of patients. 

In addition, there are constraints from the medical insurance payment side. Although this product of BrainCo has now been included in the Shanghai Medical Insurance Medical Consumables Catalog, it will still take time to achieve wide coverage of medical insurance across the country. Without the support of large-scale medical insurance reimbursement, the high terminal price may limit patients' willingness to pay to a certain extent, thereby affecting the speed of product sales growth. 

A more realistic challenge comes from the current regulatory environment. On July 1, 2026, BrainCo was selected for on-site inspection of its initial public offering application. In the "strict supervision" cycle, on-site inspection means the most rigorous penetrating verification of the enterprise's R&D expense allocation, financial authenticity, and clinical data integrity. 

Historically, enterprises selected for on-site inspection often face a high withdrawal rate. Once the company's IPO process is blocked due to flaws found in the inspection, BrainCo may directly face a huge repurchase crisis as the 2028 valuation adjustment deadline approaches, which may even lead to a shake-up of the founding team's control rights. 

At present, BrainCo's IPO is a dual test of the tolerance of the cutting-edge technology track and the pricing logic of the capital market. The company has a top domestic R&D team and a scarce "first certification" barrier, representing the cutting-edge exploration of China's brain-computer interface industrialization; but at the same time, the zero-revenue core product, the looming 5 billion yuan valuation bet, and the regulatory pressure of on-site inspection also remind market participants to maintain rational prudence. At the intersection of technological belief and financial reality, whether BrainCo can deliver a satisfactory answer to both investors and regulators remains to be further verified by the market. 

This article is from the WeChat official account "Investor Network - Thinking Finance", author: WU Wei, and is authorized for release by 36Kr.