BCI (brain-computer interface) technology — in which neural signals are routed from a person’s head to a computer — was once the stuff of science fiction, but these days the technology represents a competitive corner of the tech industry. One of the companies racing to commercialize BCI is Neurable, which this week announced that it’s looking to license its “mind-reading” technology to consumer wearables.
Neurable specializes in “non-invasive” BCI, which distinguishes itself from firms like Neuralink — the Elon Musk-founded startup known for inserting computer chips directly into people’s skulls — in that its product doesn’t require users to undergo brain surgery to enjoy its benefits.
Neurable’s technology works through a combination of EEG sensors and signal processing that can scan a user’s brain activity, analyze it with AI, and provide information about a person’s cognitive performance.
In December, Neurable raised $35 million in a Series A, which it plans to use to scale the commercialization of its technology. This week, the company announced that, as part of its expansion effort, it is looking to license its technology to a variety of consumer-facing companies.
The idea is that mind-reading tech (which can provide detailed data about how a person’s brain works while they’re engaged in various activities) could be integrated into wearables across a number of industries — including health and athletic products, productivity tools, and gaming. “Through Neurable’s licensing platform, OEMs can directly integrate its AI-powered brain-sensing technology into existing hardware, such as headphones, hats, glasses, and headbands, while maintaining full control over product design, user experience, and distribution,” the company said in a press release on Tuesday.
Neurable has already fostered partnerships with a number of companies to test out its effectiveness. This includes HP Inc.’s HyperX, a gaming brand, with which it created a headset designed to help gamers “level up their game play by optimizing focus and performance.” It has also partnered with a company called iMotions, a software platform that specializes in human behavior research, to assist with the company’s research initiatives.
In an interview, Neurable’s CEO Ramses Alcaide declined to say what new partnerships the company has in the works, but said that the company was seeking to expand its purview across a host of domains.
“In the past, we were very specific about our partnerships,” Alcaide said, noting that Neurable tended to home in on a particular company to prove that a unique commercial application was worthwhile. Now that they know expectations can be met on a number of fronts, the startup is focused on scaling itself, he said.
“What we’re doing now is we’re basically saying, like, ‘Hey, we’ve demonstrated that we’re getting great traction’,” Alcaide said. “Like, let’s make this as ubiquitous as heart rate sensors on your wrist, right?”
Despite the “non-invasive” label, brain data is arguably a little bit more intimate than the information culled from a heart rate sensor, so what kind of privacy protections does a company like Neurable provide?
Alcaide said that the company ensures that user data is “protected and anonymized.” The company’s privacy policy provides a variety of different guidelines for when and how a user’s data might be accessed and used. “We make sure we follow HIPAA standards, like we’ve gone above and beyond where a lot of startups would be at our stage to make sure that we protect the data, we encrypt it, and that we anonymize it,” Alcaide said.
Does Neurable leverage a user’s neural data to train its AI software? “We can with user consent, right?” said Alcaide. “But we do it in a very specific way.” That specific way involves asking the user whether their data can be used for the purposes of particular experiments, Alcaide said. “We are not collecting the data, just training on it willy-nilly,” he said. In other words, this kind of data usage is quite targeted.
Alcaide said that his industry is at an “inflection point” — one wherein there finally exists “a real business model in neuro-technology that is scalable.” What comes after that inflection point is the big question.