Neuralink Corp. is an American neurotechnology company that is developing implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). It was founded by Elon Musk and a team of eight scientists and engineers. Neuralink was launched in 2016 and first publicly reported in March 2017. The company is based in Fremont, California, with plans to build a three-story building with office and manufacturing space in Del Valle, about 10 miles east of Gigafactory Texas, Tesla's headquarters and manufacturing plant.
Since its founding, the company has hired several high-profile neuroscientists from various universities. By 2019, it had received $158 million in funding ($100 million was from Musk) and had 90 employees. At that time, Neuralink announced that it was working on a "sewing machine-like" device capable of implanting very thin (4 to 6 μm in width)Elizabeth Lopatto. Elon Musk unveils Neuralink's plans for brain-reading 'threads' and a robot to insert them. . The Verge. 16 July 2019. threads into the brain, and demonstrated a system that reads information from a lab rat via 1,500 electrodes. It anticipated starting experiments with humans in 2020, but later moved that to 2023. As of May 2023, it has been approved for human trials in the United States. On January 29, 2024, Musk announced that Neuralink had successfully implanted a Neuralink device in a human and that the patient was recovering. He was later identified as Noland Arbaugh.
The company has faced criticism for the large number of primates that were euthanized after medical trials. The monkeys' veterinary records allegedly show complications with surgically implanted electrodes. In September 2024, Neuralink announced that its latest development effort, Blindsight, would enable blind people whose visual cortex is undamaged to regain some level of vision. The development received "breakthrough" status from the U.S. federal government, which will accelerate development. In August and September 2025, Toronto's University Health Network performed Canada's first Neuralink brain implant surgeries on two patients with cervical spinal cord injuries, marking the first such procedures outside the United States.
Company
History
Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Elon Musk and a founding team of eight scientists and engineers: Max Hodak, Benjamin Rapoport, Dongjin Seo, Paul Merolla, Philip Sabes, Tim Gardner, Tim Hanson, and Vanessa Tolosa. The initial hires included experts in neuroscience, biochemistry, and robotics. In January 2017, Musk proxies approached Pedram Mohseni and Randolph Nudo, who owned the rights to the name "NeuraLink".
In April 2017, Neuralink announced that it was aiming in the short term to make devices to treat serious brain diseases, with the eventual goal of human enhancement, sometimes called transhumanism. Musk said his interest in the idea partly stemmed from the concept of "neural lace" in the fictional universe in The Culture, a series of 10 novels by Iain M. Banks.
Musk defined the neural lace as a "digital layer above the cortex" that would not necessarily require extensive surgical insertion but could be implanted through a vein or artery.Elon Musk thinks we will have to use AI this way to avoid a catastrophic future . Robert Ferris, CNBC News. 31 January 2017. He said the long-term goal is to achieve "symbiosis with artificial intelligence",Elon Musk believes AI could turn humans into an endangered species like the mountain gorilla . Isobel Asher Hamilton, Business Insider. 26 November 2018. which he perceives as an existential threat to humanity if unchecked.Everything you need to know about Neuralink: Elon Musk's brainy new venture . Tyler Lacoma, Digital Trends. 7 November 2017. He believes the device will be "something analogous to a video game, like a saved game situation, where you are able to resume and upload your last state" and "address brain injuries or spinal injuries and make up for whatever lost capacity somebody has with a chip."
Jared Birchall, the head of Musk's family office, was listed as Neuralink's CEO, CFO, and president in 2018. , Musk was its majority owner but did not hold an executive position.No-Action Letter: Neuralink Corp . U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), October 16, 2018 Co-founder Benjamin Rapoport cited safety concerns as a major influence on his decision to leave Neuralink in 2018. Rapoport subsequently founded Precision Neuroscience, emphasizing the use of surface electrodes as opposed to the penetrating electrodes of Neuralink, in order to address brain damage and other safety concerns caused by Neuralink's devices.
By August 2020, only three of the eight founding scientists remained at the company, according to an article by Stat News. It reported that Neuralink had seen "years of internal conflict in which rushed timelines have clashed with the slow and incremental pace of science". , Neuralink was headquartered in San Francisco's Mission District, sharing the Pioneer building with OpenAI, another company Musk co-founded. , Neuralink's headquarters were in Fremont, California.
In April 2021, Neuralink demonstrated a monkey playing the game "Pong" using a Neuralink implant. Similar technology had existed since 2002, when a research group demonstrated a monkey moving a computer cursor with neural signals, but scientists acknowledged that making the implant wireless and increasing the number of implanted electrodes represented engineering progress.
In May 2021, co-founder and president Max Hodak announced that he no longer worked with the company. Only two of the eight co-founders remained at the company as of January 2022. On February 8, 2024, Musk changed the location of Neuralink's business incorporation from Delaware to Nevada after Delaware Chancery Court Chief Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick voided Musk's $55 billion pay package at Tesla. In April 2025, Neuralink falsely called itself a "small disadvantaged business" in a federal filing with the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Technology In 2018, Gizmodo reported that Neuralink "remained highly secretive about its work". Public records showed that it had sought to open an animal testing facility in San Francisco, but it subsequently began doing research at the University of California, Davis. In 2019, during a live presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, the Neuralink team revealed the technology of the first prototype it had been working on. It is a system that involves ultra-thin probes inserted into the brain, a neurosurgical robot to perform the operations, and a high-density electronic system capable of processing information from neurons. It is based on technology developed at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley.
Probes The probes, made mostly of polyimide, a biocompatible material, with a thin gold or platinum conductor, are inserted into the brain through an automated process performed by a surgical robot. Each probe consists of an area of wires that contains electrodes capable of locating electrical signals in the brain and a sensory area where the wire interacts with an electronic system that allows amplification and acquisition of the brain signal. Each probe contains 48 or 96 wires, each of which contains 32 independent electrodes, making a system of up to 3,072 electrodes per formation.Elon Musk's Neuralink Aims to Merge Human Brain With A.I. Dinker, TechBrackets. 18 July 2019.
Robot Neuralink says it has engineered a surgical robot capable of rapidly inserting many flexible probes into the brain, which may avoid the tissue damage and longevity problems associated with larger, more rigid probes. This surgical robot has an insertion head with a 25 μm diameter needle made of tungsten-rhenium designed to attach to the insertion loops, inject individual probes, and penetrate the meninges and cerebral tissue; it can insert up to six wires (192 electrodes) per minute. A linear motor powers the needle, enabling fast retraction acceleration and varying insertion speeds. A 50-μm tungsten wire that has been bent at the tip and is driven both axially and rotationally makes up the pincher. An imaging stack is also included in the inserter head for needle guidance, real-time insertion viewing, and verification.
Electronics
Neuralink has developed an application-specific integrated circuit to create a 1,536-channel recording system. This system consists of 256 amplifiers that can be individually programmed, analog-to-digital converters within the chip, and peripheral circuit control to serialize the digitized information obtained. It aims to convert information obtained from neurons into an understandable binary code in order to achieve greater understanding of brain function and the ability to stimulate these neurons back. So far, Neuralink's electrodes are too big to record the firing of individual neurons; they can record only the firing of a group of neurons. Neuralink representatives believe this issue may be mitigated algorithmically, but it is computationally expensive and does not produce exact results. In July 2020, Musk said that Neuralink had obtained a FDA breakthrough device designation, which allows limited human testing under the FDA guidelines for medical devices.Neuralink Progress Update, Summer 2020 , Neuralink, 28 August 2020, accessed 4 October 2020.
Public compression challenge
On May 29, 2024, Musk issued a request for public input on a challenge facing Neuralink. He suggested that due to the size of the data in need of transmission, a compression rate of more than 200x was needed. The challenge specified that compression needed to be lossless, work under low power, and compress data in real time. Software consultant Roy van Rijn called the prospect of 200x lossless compression "just outlandish."Neuralink Compression Challenge.
Animal testing and harm Neuralink tests its devices by surgically implanting them in the brains of live monkeys, pigs, and other animals. This has been criticized by groups such as PETA. In August 2020, Neuralink conducted a live demo in which the brain activity of a pig, Gertrude, was displayed in real time. A removable device, the size of a coin (23 millimeters), was implanted in Gertrude's brain and recorded signals from the neurons connected to her snout as she interacted with her environment, such as when she sniffed or touched things. The data showed that the technology could read and interpret brain signals, which is key to developing applications that can treat neurological conditions, enable brain-to-machine communication, or enhance human cognition. The demonstration included two other pigs. The Neuralink chip implanted in one of the pigs was removed to demonstrate that it could be done without harming the pig. The third pig, which did not have an implanted chip, served as a comparison to show the similarity in health and behavior of the implanted and non-implanted pigs.
From 2017 to 2020, Neuralink's experiments on monkeys were conducted in partnership with University of California, Davis. At the end of the partnership, UC Davis transferred seven monkeys to Neuralink. In 2022, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal welfare advocacy group, alleged that Neuralink and UC Davis had mistreated several monkeys, subjecting them to psychological distress, extreme suffering, and chronic infections due to surgeries. Experiments conducted by Neuralink and UC Davis have involved at least 23 monkeys, and the PCRM believes that 15 of those died or were euthanized as a result of the experiments. The PCRM also alleged that UC Davis withheld photographic and video evidence of the mistreatment.