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) 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" and the prototype on which Musk's company based its work. 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. He said the long-term goal is to achieve "symbiosis with artificial intelligence", which he perceives as an existential threat to humanity if unchecked. 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. As of September 2018, Musk was its majority owner but did not hold an executive position. 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". As of 2020, Neuralink was headquartered in San Francisco's Mission District, sharing the Pioneer building with OpenAI, another company Musk co-founded. As of 2022, 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.
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