Neuralink rival StairMed secures largest funding among Chinese brain-computer interface firms
The latest funding round for the Shanghai-based start-up was led by Qiming Venture, OrbiMed, and Lilly Asia
Shanghai-based brain-computer interface (BCI) company StairMed, which claims to outperform Elon Musk’s Neuralink in certain areas, has raised 350 million yuan (US$48 million) in the largest-ever funding round for a Chinese start-up in the field.
The company, which develops implantable BCI devices and surgical robots, said that its “recently” completed funding round was led by China’s Qiming Venture Partners, healthcare-focused OrbiMed, and Lilly Asia Ventures, a spin-off of American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.
StairMed called it the largest fundraising round for a Chinese implantable BCI company, according to a post on Monday on its official WeChat account. It added that the capital would be used to accelerate clinical trials, for research and development and to build a new production facility. StairMed’s last round was in 2023, when it raised “hundreds of millions of yuan”.
Lilly Asia Ventures praised StairMed as a “global leader” in “flexible electrode technology and full-stack BCI system development capabilities”.
01:50
Chinese researchers claim brain-computer interface breakthrough using monkey brain signal
The start-up said that its ultra-flexible neural electrodes, used in BCI devices for data acquisition, take up just one-hundredth the size of a hairline, or a fifth the size of Neuralink’s electrodes. The product is also “hundreds of times softer” than Neuralink’s alternative, “making it difficult for brain tissue to ‘feel’ the electrode’s ‘intrusion’”, it said.
