The breakout year of breakneck development for brain-computer interface: 7.2 billion yuan of hot capital is in place, the talent war has already kicked off | Panorama
"Workplace Bonus" (ID: ZhiChangHongLi)
In 2026, the brain-computer interface (BCI) industry ushers in a "breakneck growth period". Along with this trend, the salaries of relevant high-end, cutting-edge and scarce talents keep rising, yet top professionals in this field are still extremely difficult to find.
Relevant data [1] shows that in the first half of 2026, the number of intelligent medical device positions covering keywords such as BCI, surgical robots and wearable devices increased by 113.1% year-on-year. In terms of specific compensation, the reference annual salary in the BCI field ranges from 180,000 to 470,000 RMB, with an average annual salary of about 325,000 RMB.
On recruitment platforms, by using keywords such as "BCI, BCI algorithm", the annual salary of neural decoding algorithm engineers that can be retrieved is as high as 600,000 to 900,000 RMB, and senior experts can earn more than one million RMB per year.
The boom of BCI is jointly supported by policies and capital.
In 2026, BCI was written into the government work report for the first time and included in the future industry direction of the 15th Five-Year Plan. On the capital side, the domestic track raised more than 7.2 billion RMB in financing only in the first half of the year, three times the total amount of 2025. BrainCo (with the largest single financing in China's BCI sector) and BrainRoam (which obtained the world's first Class III medical device registration certificate for implantable BCI) are competing for the title of "the first BCI listed company".
The prosperity belongs to capital and traffic, but it is talents that truly determine the development trend of the BCI industry competition.
"Enterprises mainly engaged in BCI can hardly get one doctor on average." At the 4th China BCI Competition, Gao Xiaorong, Director of the Neural Engineering Laboratory of Tsinghua University, once told reporters his judgment on the scarcity of talents in the industry.
Gao Xiaorong is the initiator of the China BCI Competition and one of the earliest scholars studying BCI in China. His judgment is based on a set of supply and demand data comparison: as of the interview date, there are only 197 doctoral dissertations in the BCI field included in CNKI, while there are more than 200 domestic enterprises mainly engaged in BCI [2] .
In universities, talent cultivation is still advancing slowly along the cycle of traditional departments and research groups, and only a few leading enterprises in the industry have cultivated a group of mature forces with the advantage of early entry.
At present, a number of academic experts and industry leaders have reached a consensus on the mismatch between the growth rate of talent supply and demand in the BCI industry.
Ming Dong, Vice President of Tianjin University, once said that what future industries such as BCI lack the most at present is not scenarios or funds, but continuous talent supply and the maturity of relevant technology chains. Tao Hu, founder of BrainCo (with dual backgrounds of scholar and entrepreneur), also sees that the existing talents in the BCI field are limited, "Most talents are cross-introduced from other medical device industries or even non-medical device industries. What we lack most at present are outstanding system engineers who can integrate multiple disciplines."
Under the circumstance that the development of the whole industry requires cross-industry talent poaching, where to find talents has become a problem worth tracking more than financing figures: in which university laboratories are these talents hidden? And from which adjacent tracks can they be poached?
[1] The job information is from the 2026 Biomedical Industry Talent Development Report released by Zhaopin on August 31; the compensation data refers to the Future Industry Human Resource Development Catalogue released by Beijing Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau on September 11.
[2] The supply and demand data of talents in the BCI industry pointed out by Gao Xiaorong comes from CNKI and the 2025 Brain-Computer Interface Technology and Application Research Report respectively. As of the press date, 206 doctoral dissertations in the BCI direction were detected in CNKI; the 2026 Brain-Computer Interface Technology and Application Research Report shows that there are nearly 200 domestic enterprises mainly engaged in BCI.
High-end Talent Traceability
Combining public financing, clinical/registration progress and technical route situation, "Workplace Bonus" conducted an inventory of domestic BCI companies and found that:
In the implantable direction (including invasive and semi-invasive), the top companies include BrainRoam, Step Medical, NeuroX, BrainCo, Brilliance BCI, CoreSmart (state-owned holding company) and so on. In the non-invasive direction, BrainCo completed a Series B+ financing of up to 2 billion RMB, which is the largest single financing in the history of China's BCI sector, followed by NeuroEngine, U-Brain Galaxy, Gestalt and other enterprises.
Among them, Gestalt is the first BCI company in China to choose the ultrasonic technical route, and Huachao Shenkong is another company with the same technical route that has obtained financing of over 100 million RMB.
The BCI industry has an extremely high density of top talents — public information shows that most of the founders and core team members of current domestic BCI companies have master's or doctoral degrees from top universities at home and abroad or backgrounds of top laboratories, and several leading BCI companies are even founded by heads of university/institute research groups or led by them as technical leaders.
Further, the governance structure of these companies usually presents a "dual-core" feature: BrainCo was "scientist Tao Hu + serial entrepreneur Peng Lei" in the early stage, and NeuroX is "chief scientist Fang Ying + Song Qi with Class III certificate transformation experience", which belongs to a typical partnership of scientists and industrialization practitioners. Zhao Zhengtao of Step Medical partners with Li Xue, and Xu Honglai of BrainRoam partners with Huang Xiaoshan, which are closer to the dual-scientist/dual-PI combination, but there are clear divisions of labor between technology and industrialization among the above partners.
What the above combinations really solve is the complementarity between technical route correctness, engineering capability, clinical registration efficiency and capital communication in cutting-edge technology entrepreneurship.
Different from the situation that the departures of Neuralink, a "star company" in foreign BCI, have almost recreated half of the US BCI industry, the underlying talent supply behind domestic leading BCI companies mostly comes from several clear academic lineages: three generations of disciples and followers from Tsinghua University, two enterprises from Beijing Institute of Brain Science, and multi-node development from the Chinese Academy of Sciences...
From this perspective, the competition of domestic BCI is ostensibly a race of financing amount and number of clinical implant cases, and at the bottom it is still a competition of organizational efficiency among academic lineages, engineering platforms and clinical resources.
● Tsinghua University: Three Generations in One Discipline, From Laboratory to STAR Market
On June 11, the STAR Market IPO application of 「BrainRoam」 was accepted, which is expected to impact the title of "the first BCI listed company". The core support for its leading position is: when domestic similar competitors (Step Medical, BrainCo, etc.) are still in the clinical trial stage, it was the first to complete the clinical surgical verification of semi-invasive (epidural) equipment; its core product NEO-ONE SCI has become the world's first approved Class III implantable BCI medical device, which is expected to have an exclusive commercialization window of 2-3 years.
As the industrialization carrier of the Neural Engineering Laboratory of the School of Biomedical Engineering of Tsinghua University, the core technology and talents of BrainRoam all come from this laboratory. Tracing up the teacher-student context of the two founders Xu Honglai and Huang Xiaoshan, we can find that three generations of Tsinghua talents have completed the closed loop of "founder, inheritor, practitioner" in the BCI field:
First Generation Founder | Academic Pioneer
"Workplace Bonus" (ID: ZhiChangHongLi)
"Workplace Bonus" (ID: ZhiChangHongLi)
Gao Shangkai and Gao Xiaorong are the main founders of China's neural engineering and BCI discipline.
Since 1998, the two have led the team to take the lead in carrying out BCI research in China; in 1999, their self-developed four-target steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) [3] BCI successfully realized the mind-controlled cursor movement, making "controlling external objects with thoughts" a reality from imagination.
The idea of this technology originated from an experimental project in 1995: in order to solve the problem that astronauts could not call for a stop in time due to high-intensity gravity vertigo during centrifuge training, the team used an electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring system to monitor their consciousness state in real time, to distinguish whether the astronauts were awake during training, so that when they could not actively call for a stop, the system would automatically terminate the dangerous centrifuge training.
In the following two decades, the team focused on BCI technology and neural signal detection and processing, continuously improving the number of targets, recognition speed and information transmission rate of non-invasive visual BCI.
As a "pioneer" in carrying out BCI research in China, the technical route created by Gao Shangkai and Gao Xiaorong is an important academic origin of China's non-invasive BCI research.
Second Generation Inheritor | Clinical Transformation
"Workplace Bonus" (ID: ZhiChangHongLi)
Hong Bo, graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering of Tsinghua University for his bachelor's degree, studied under Professor Yang Fusheng, professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Biomedical Engineering of Tsinghua University.
In the late 1990s, under the guidance of Professor Yang Fusheng, his research direction shifted from "transferring energy" [4] to "transferring information" — he joined the team led by Professor Yang Fusheng and Professor Gao Shangkai, and his doctoral topic was EEG signal processing.
In 2001, Hong Bo obtained his doctorate from the Department of Biomedical Engineering of Tsinghua University for proposing a new method of EEG analysis, and stayed at the university to teach; from 2006 to 2008, three innovative BCI technologies [5] developed by his team were all shortlisted in the top ten of the 2010 Global BCI Grand Prix (BCI Award).
In the following nearly two decades, Professor Hong Bo's research on BCI has deepened from non-invasive to implantable systems and clinical transformation. The implantable BCI hand motor function compensation system (NEO system) developed by his team is the world's first approved implantable BCI medical device.
Third Generation Practitioner | Industrialization
"Workplace Bonus" (ID: ZhiChangHongLi)
"Workplace Bonus" (ID: ZhiChangHongLi)
The two post-80s founders of BrainRoam, Xu Honglai and Huang Xiaoshan, are fellow apprentices and roommates, studying under Professor Gao Shangkai, one of the founders of China's BCI field. In addition, Xu Honglai is also the first doctoral student jointly supervised by Professor Hong Bo (appointed as doctoral supervisor in 2012).
In 2006, it was a few words from Professor Hong Bo that reversed Xu Honglai's career development direction — he gave up the offer from a large medical device manufacturer, continued to pursue his doctorate to overcome technical problems, and transformed academic innovation achievements into entrepreneurial opportunities.
In 2011, with technological innovation (digital signal processing, traditional EEG acquisition uses analog circuits to process signals) and 1 million RMB angel investment obtained from entrepreneurship courses, BrainRoam was registered. In 2012, Xu Honglai graduated with a doctorate and went to Changzhou to officially start his business.
After more than ten years of development, BrainRoam's current product matrix has two routes: semi-invasive (NEO wireless minimally invasive implantable BCI system) and non-invasive (digital electroencephalograph, transcranial electrical stimulation system, etc.). Its main business revenue completely depends on the latter. The semi-invasive new product has