Neuralink and Its Rivals: Who's Winning the Race to Merge Humans With Machines
Twelve people can already control a computer with their mind — and that's just the start of a fight for the human brain.
The first time Noland Arbaugh played online chess using only his thoughts, it probably felt like the closing scene of a science fiction film. Arbaugh, paralyzed from the shoulders down after a diving accident, received a Neuralink brain implant in January 2024. Within weeks, he was moving a cursor, browsing the web, and winning games of Civilization VI, all without lifting a finger — because he couldn’t. By September 2025, twelve people worldwide had received Neuralink implants, all with severe paralysis, all now controlling digital tools through thought alone.
The race to merge humans with machines is no longer theoretical. It’s clinical. It’s funded. And it’s getting competitive in ways that would make even Musk nervous — if he were capable of that.
This is a fight with several distinct fronts: surgical risk tolerance, electrode counts, regulatory strategy, and something much thornier — the question of whose brain data ends up in whose database. The companies involved are all betting on different versions of the future, and it’s genuinely unclear which version wins. Let me walk you through the contenders. 🧠
Neuralink: the loud, fast, and expensive bet
Neuralink’s The Link implant is about the size of a quarter, 23mm wide and 8mm thick. It sits where a small piece of skull used to be, connected to the brain by hair-thin electrodes threaded into the tissue. The device reads electrical signals from neurons and translates them into digital commands in real time. Think of it as a Bluetooth adapter for your motor cortex.
The ambition here is enormous. Musk has called it a potential “Fitbit in your skull,” which is maybe the most reductive description of brain surgery ever offered by a tech billionaire. The longer-term goal — human-AI symbiosis, merging biological and artificial intelligence — is harder to square with the current clinical reality of helping ALS patients type messages to their families. STAT News reported in January 2026 that Neuralink’s public rhetoric about human augmentation actively worries the company’s medical device competitors, who fear it muddies FDA relationships for the whole industry. That’s a real problem, not a hypothetical one. 🔬
Still, the momentum is hard to ignore:
12 humans implanted as of September 2025, ranging from ALS patients to quadriplegics with spinal cord injuries
ALS patient Brad Smith now uses The Link as his primary communication tool, typing entirely with his brain
The company raised $650 million in Series E funding in 2025, pushing its valuation to $9 billion
International trials now run in the UK (at University College London Hospitals and Newcastle), Canada, and the UAE at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi
Neuralink received an FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for its speech restoration technology in 2025
On December 31, 2025, Musk announced that Neuralink would begin high-volume production of brain implants in 2026, with a mostly automated surgical procedure. The new approach threads electrodes through the dura — the tough membrane covering the brain — without removing it, which is a genuine technical step forward. ⚡
Early thread retraction was a real issue in Arbaugh’s surgery, with some of the thin electrodes pulling back from brain tissue and reducing the effective electrode count. Neuralink quietly resolved much of this over time, but it’s a reminder that the gap between “functioning” and “reliable” in brain hardware is still wide.
What does this mean for you as a reader? If you’re a tech enthusiast tracking where serious money and serious medical need intersect, Neuralink is still the story. Whether it stays that way is another question entirely.
Synchron: the quiet contender winning on pragmatism
While Neuralink grabs headlines, Synchron is building a case for being the company that actually makes it to market first. Founded in 2012 by Thomas Oxley and Nicholas Opie, the Australian-American company has one decisive advantage over its competitor: it doesn’t require open brain surgery. 🩺
Synchron’s Stentrode is delivered through the jugular vein. It travels up through the blood vessels and settles beside the brain’s motor cortex, where it reads neural signals from the vascular wall. No craniotomy. No robot drilling through your skull. The tradeoff is bandwidth — the Stentrode picks up fewer signals than Neuralink’s deeply implanted electrodes — but for regulators and patients nervous about neurosurgery, that tradeoff looks awfully reasonable.
The company has already demonstrated impressive real-world results:
Patients controlling an iPhone and Apple Vision Pro using thought alone
One early US trial participant now commands Amazon Alexa without speaking
Synchron demonstrated its BCI’s ability to control an iPad in August 2025, using Apple’s BCI Human Interface Device input protocol announced in May 2025
That last point matters more than it might seem. Apple built a software on-ramp for BCIs into its ecosystem. Synchron’s Stentrode is already compatible. Neuralink is not, at least not yet. When a company the size of Apple aligns itself with your hardware approach, that’s not just a partnership — it’s a distribution channel for every iPhone and Vision Pro on the planet.
Synchron is backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and a $75 million investment round. Even Musk himself reached out to Synchron’s CEO Tom Oxley in 2022 during a period of Neuralink delays, exploring a potential deal. The conversation went nowhere. In retrospect, that looks like a missed shot.
Ask yourself: if you could gain the ability to control a digital device with your thoughts, but the choice was between a minimally invasive vascular procedure versus a robot drilling into your skull, which one would you pick? Because most people, when asked that question directly, choose the vein. And regulators seem to feel the same way.
Precision Neuroscience, Paradromics, and the crowded field
The BCI space isn’t a two-horse race, even if media coverage makes it look that way. Several other companies are moving fast and thinking differently about the hardware problem. 💡
Precision Neuroscience is the most interesting Neuralink-adjacent story here. Co-founded by Benjamin Rapoport, one of the eight original co-founders of Neuralink, the New York-based startup built the Layer 7 Cortical Interface, a thin-film electrode array that sits on the brain’s surface rather than penetrating it. The device looks like a piece of scotch tape. It’s flexible, reversible, and safer to remove than traditional deep-brain implants. Precision raised $102 million to advance AI-powered brain recording, and its total funding now sits at $147 million. Its initial target applications are stroke rehabilitation and treatment of refractory depression — both massive markets.
Then there’s Paradromics, an Austin-based company whose Connexus system can handle up to 1,600 channels of neural data, significantly more than current systems. Paradromics received FDA IDE approval for its Connect-One study in 2025, targeting speech restoration and computer control in people with severe paralysis. The Connexus implant was shown to record electrical brain signals and be removed intact in under 20 minutes during its first human procedure. That’s a meaningful safety feature when the device sits inside someone’s head.
A few others worth watching:
BlackRock Neurotech has more total implanted users than Neuralink in absolute terms, and has operated for longer
ONWARD Medical completed five successful BCI implants for spinal cord injury patients by late 2025, with procedures at a neurosurgery center in Lausanne, Switzerland
Axoft (Cambridge, MA) performed its first-in-human BCI implant in April 2025
Starfish Neuroscience is developing a wireless, battery-free chip designed to interact with multiple brain regions simultaneously, targeting Parkinson’s disease
That’s a lot of companies, a lot of approaches, and a lot of money. As NeurotechMag reported earlier this year, disclosed BCI funding exceeded $1.3 billion in 2025 alone, and the neurotechnology market is projected to grow from roughly $15–17 billion today to over $47 billion by 2035. This isn’t a niche. It’s an arms race with electrodes instead of missiles. 📈
The regulation question nobody wants to answer
Here’s what the breathless coverage of brain-computer interfaces tends to skip past: who owns the data your implanted device collects?
Neural data is not like your step count or your heart rate. Researchers have demonstrated that AI models can decode inner speech from brain signals with up to 74% accuracy. A 2024 study decoded neural activity while subjects listened to music, reconstructing the Pink Floyd song they were hearing through generative AI alone. Brain signals can already be used to infer what you’re thinking about, not just what you want to move. That is a fundamentally different category of information than anything data privacy law was designed to handle. 🔐
The US Senate noticed. In September 2025, Senators Chuck Schumer, Maria Cantwell, and Ed Markey introduced the Management of Individuals’ Neural Data Act — the MIND Act — which directs the FTC to study neural data governance, identify regulatory gaps, and recommend new protections. California, Colorado, Connecticut, and Montana have already amended their state privacy laws to include neural data. Chile went further, amending its constitution to protect brain activity as a fundamental right. In November 2025, UNESCO adopted a global Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology.
None of these frameworks are fast enough to keep pace with the hardware. The MIND Act is a study, not a law. UNESCO’s recommendation isn’t binding. The gap between what BCI devices can collect and what regulation currently restricts them from doing is enormous, and some legal scholars are openly skeptical that industry self-regulation will ever genuinely limit a technology sitting on a goldmine of intimate personal data.
Neuralink, specifically, draws scrutiny here. The company recently recruited a senior FDA official away from the regulatory office that oversees it — a move that competitors described to STAT News as “infuriating.” Whether that affects regulatory outcomes is unknown. That it created that level of reaction in a small, competitive industry is telling enough.
The ethics aren’t abstract. If you’ve ever wondered what it might feel like to have your thoughts treated as a data point, the infrastructure for that is currently being implanted into twelve people’s skulls. What’s your line? Where does “restoring lost function” end and “reading minds for profit” begin? That distinction is the hardest question in tech right now, and we’re not even close to answering it.
Who’s actually winning?
Here’s the honest answer: it depends entirely on how you define winning. 🏆
By media coverage and funding — Neuralink wins. Its $9 billion valuation, celebrity patients, and Elon Musk’s ability to generate headlines make it the reference point every other company in this space is measured against. Morgan Stanley’s private 2025 report argued Neuralink sits at the center of a technological shift society isn’t prepared for, spanning healthcare, defense, gaming, and investing.
By regulatory momentum — Synchron wins. Its endovascular approach carries fewer surgical risks, which is exactly what the FDA and international regulators want to see before they approve any device for broad use. Apple’s software partnership gives Synchron consumer distribution that no other BCI company currently has.
By technical ambition — the picture is murkier. Paradromics’ channel count, Precision’s reversibility, and Neuralink’s electrode density are all solving different versions of the same problem: how do you build a reliable, long-term, high-fidelity interface between biological neurons and digital systems? Nobody has solved it yet.
By patient impact right now — every company doing this work is winning, at least a little. Brad Smith, completely paralyzed and ventilator-dependent, types with his brain. Synchron’s patients play video games with their thoughts. People who lost their voice to ALS are starting to get it back. The competitive advantages that neurotech companies build are ultimately grounded in this — the ability to access and modulate the one system in the body no other technology touches.
The race isn’t over. In fact, it’s barely started. Neuralink plans to move to automated surgery and high-volume production in 2026. Its Blindsight implant — designed to restore vision for the completely blind by stimulating the visual cortex — is scheduled for its first patient trial this year. Synchron is launching a commercially available system. Precision wants to commercialize by 2025. The whole field is accelerating faster than the legal and ethical framework surrounding it.
Which brings me back to the only question that actually matters at the end of this: not “who is winning,” but “winning what, exactly?” If winning means the first company to put a chip in a healthy person’s brain so they can scroll Twitter faster, that’s a very different prize than building technology that gives a paralyzed parent back the ability to type a message to their kid. These companies claim to be after the second thing. History has a way of testing those claims.
What would make you consider a brain implant — and what would have to be guaranteed before you’d ever agree to it? Drop it in the comments. The answer matters more than most people think. 👇
For the broader context on where all of this sits in the neurotech market, this breakdown of tipping-point signals for neurotech is worth your time.