Who has never dreamt of taking control of its environment without using the hands, just thinking? And if these assumptions looking like science fiction are turning to reality thanks to neurotechnologies!
For a long time, neurosciences were an exclusive domain of healthcare, and technologies associated were serving two main applications: neurostimulation and neurosensing. In early 2000’s the concept of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) emerged with the strong objective to use brain and peripheral nerve information to the benefit of patients.
More recently, BCI got the objective not only to serve the medical sector but to exploit brain signal for a broad range of applications in industrial, military and consumer fields. This has surely caught the attention of ambitious people like Elon Musk who founded Neuralink in this domain in 2017 or Bryan Johnson who invested $100M in his company Kernel. Web giants, with companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft are also watching these new technologies carefully.
Facebook is strongly involved in a project of “typing-by-brain” as a silent speech interface, while Microsoft is publishing patents on “mind control” that allows users to operate apps using their mind without gesture. The conjunction of neurosciences, advanced microtechnologies and rapid adoption of wearables lead to the emergence of innovative start-up companies and number of initiatives supported by public or private organizations.
In the last 3 to 4 years, a wave of fundraising reached a cumulative $300M in BCI companies accompanied by national initiatives like the Obama’s Brain Initiative project supported by US government inspired by the success of the Human Genome Project. If we take the model of the DNA sequencing history, given that researchers are going faster today thanks to computer science, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the discovery of a groundbreaking technology to record brain signals before 2030.
This report is covering the 3 main segments of neurotechnologies (neurostimulation, neurosensing, and BCI), the dynamic of the market through fundraisings, merger & acquisition as well as comprehensive roadmaps of product developments.
