Columbia University Spinoff Raises Stakes in BCI Market

by James Cavuoto, editor

January 2026 issue

The market for brain-computer interfaces continues to attract new entrants and new technologies, fueled in large part by the vast amounts of venture capital investment in the space. The latest U.S. entrant in this market is a spinoff from Columbia University called Kampto Neurotech.

The company plans to commercialize a flexible, subdural brain implant with 65,000 electrodes and 1,024 channels. Fabricated as a single chip, the new implant is orders of magnitude faster and smaller than other BCIs, the company says, offering an opportunity for more efficacious treatment of a number of neurological conditions.

The transformational potential of this new system lies in its small size and ability to transfer data at high rates. Developed by researchers at Columbia University, New York-Presbyterian, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania, this BCI relies on a single silicon chip to establish a wireless, high-bandwidth connection between the brain and any external computer. The platform is called the Biological Interface System to Cortex.

Described in a study published last month in Nature Electronics, BISC includes a single-chip implant, a wearable “relay station,” and the custom software required to operate the system. “Most implantable systems are built around a canister of electronics that occupies enormous volumes of space inside the body,” said Ken Shepard, Lau Family professor of electrical engineering, professor of biomedical engineering, and professor of neurological sciences at Columbia, who is one of the senior authors on the work and guided the engineering efforts. “Our implant is a single integrated circuit chip that is so thin that it can slide into the space between the brain and the skull, resting on the brain like a piece of wet tissue paper.”

Shepard was joined in the BISC effort by senior and co-corresponding author Andreas Tolias, professor at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University and co-founding director of the Enigma Project. Tolias’ pioneering work training AI models on large-scale neural datasets—including datasets recorded in the Tolias laboratory using BISC— enabled the team to evaluate the device’s neural decoding performance. “BISC turns the cortical surface into an effective portal, delivering high-bandwidth, minimally invasive read–write communication with AI and external devices,” Tolias said. “Its single-chip scalability paves the way for adaptive neuroprosthetics and brain-AI interfaces to treat many neuropsychiatric disorders, such as epilepsy.”

Brett Youngerman, assistant professor of neurological surgery at Columbia University and a neurosurgeon at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, served as the chief clinical collaborator on the project. “This high-resolution, high-data-throughput device has the potential to revolutionize the management of neurological conditions from epilepsy to paralysis,” he said. Youngerman, Shepard, and New York-Presbyterian/Columbia epilepsy neurologist Catherine Schevon were recently awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health to implement BISC in the management of drug-resistant epilepsy. “The key to effective BCI devices is to maximize the information flow to and from the brain, while making the device as minimally invasive in its surgical implantation as possible. BISC surpasses previous technology on both fronts,” said Youngerman.

“Semiconductor technology has made this possible, allowing the computing power of room-sized computers to now fit in your pocket,” Shepard said. “We are now doing the same for medical implantables, allowing complex electronics to exist in the body while taking up almost no space.”

BCIs work by interfacing with the electrical signals that neurons use to transfer information throughout the brain. Today’s state-of-the-art BCIs, used in medical contexts, are constructed from individual microelectronic components, including amplifiers, data converters, radio transmitters, and power management circuits. To accommodate all these devices, a large canister of electronics must be surgically implanted in the body, either by removing a portion of the skull or by placing the device in another location, such as the chest, and running wires to the brain.

BISC works differently. The entire implant, which occupies less than 1/1000th the size of a conventional device, is a single CMOS IC thinned to just 50 μm. With a total volume of approximately 3 mm³, the flexible chip conforms to the surface of the brain. This micro-electrocorticography device integrates 65,536 electrodes, 1,024 simultaneous recording channels, and 16,384 stimulation channels. By leveraging the large-scale manufacturing techniques developed in the semiconductor industry, these implants can be easily manufactured at scale.

The single-chip implant includes a radio transceiver, wireless powering circuit, digital control, power management, data conversion, and the analog circuits required to support the recording and stimulation interfaces. The battery-powered relay station powers and communicates with the implant, transferring data via a custom ultrawideband radio link that achieves 100 Mbps data bandwidths—a connection with at least 100 times higher throughput than any competing wireless BCI device. The relay station is itself an 802.11 WiFi device, in effect forming a relayed wireless network connection from any computer to the brain.

BISC has its own instruction set, supported by an extensive software stack, which together constitute a computing architecture designed for BCIs. As demonstrated in this study, these high-bandwidth recording capabilities allow brain-signal patterns to be submitted to advanced machine-learning or deep-learning frameworks for decoding complex intentions, perceptions, or states. “By integrating everything on one piece of silicon, we’ve shown how brain interfaces can become smaller, safer, and dramatically more powerful,” Shepard said.

The BISC implant was manufactured using TSMC’s versatile 0.13-μm bipolar-CMOS-DMOS technology. This process integrates three technologies onto a single chip to create mixed-signal ICs. This integration enables the efficient combination of digital logic (from CMOS), high-current and high-voltage analog functions (from bipolar and DMOS transistors), and power devices (from DMOS), all of which are essential for BISC.

To make this technology available to doctors and patients, Shepard’s group partnered closely with Youngerman at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Together, they refined surgical methods to safely implant the paper-thin device in a preclinical model and demonstrated its recording quality and stability, as described in the current study. Studies in human patients for short-term intraoperative recordings are underway.

“These initial studies give us invaluable data about how the device performs in a real surgical setting,” Youngerman said. “The implants can be inserted through a minimally invasive incision in the skull and slid directly onto the surface of the brain in the subdural space. The paper-thin form factor and lack of brain-penetrating electrodes or wires tethering the implant to the skull minimize tissue reactivity and signal degradation over time.”

Extensive pre-clinical testing of BISC in the motor and visual cortices drew on collaborations with both Tolias and Bijan Pesaran, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania, both of whom are leaders in computational and systems neuroscience.

“The extreme miniaturization by BISC is very exciting as a platform for new generations of implantable technologies that also interface with the brain with other modalities such as light and sound,” Pesaran said.

Developed under DARPA’s Neural Engineering System Design program, BISC combines Columbia’s strengths in microelectronics, Stanford’s and Penn’s cutting-edge neuroscience, and New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center’s surgical innovation.

To accelerate translation, the Columbia and Stanford teams launched Kampto Neurotech, a spin-off company founded by Columbia electrical engineering alumnus Nanyu Zeng, one of the project’s lead engineers. Kampto is developing commercial versions of the chip for preclinical research applications and raising funds to advance the system toward human use. “This is a fundamentally different way of building BCI devices,” said Zeng. “In this way, BISC has technological capabilities that exceed those of competing devices by many orders of magnitude.”

In a technological landscape driven by advances in AI, BCI technologies have drawn considerable recent interest in both restoring function to those affected by neurological conditions and in potentially augmenting human capabilities by providing direct interfaces to the brain.

“By combining ultra-high resolution neural recording with fully wireless operation, and pairing that with advanced decoding and stimulation algorithms, we are moving toward a future where the brain and AI systems can interact seamlessly—not just for research, but for human benefit,” said Shepard. “This could change how we treat brain disorders, how we interface with machines, and ultimately how humans engage with AI.”

Meanwhile, other players in the BCI market have reported progress. Precision Neuroscience announced a strategic partnership with Medtronic to advance neurosurgery, leveraging Precision’s BCI technology and Medtronic’s Neuroscience portfolio. The companies will co-develop an integrated solution that combines Precision’s Layer 7 cortical interface with the Medtronic StealthStation surgical navigation system.

Merge Labs announced an investment of $252 million from Sam Altman’s OpenAI firm. “We’re developing a new paradigm for BCIs using molecules instead of electrodes,” said Merge co-founder Mikhail Shapiro

Neuralink reported they now have 21 users implanted with the company’s BCI. And the company added former FDA and NIH official David McMullen as .its head of medical affairs. “My highest calling has always been to get safe and effective devices to the people who need them most,” he said. “Neuralink is one of the very few places where that mission feels not just possible, but urgent.”

A Chinese BCI startup called BrainCo was reported to have received $280 million in funding this month. Another Chinese firm, NeuroXess, announced it had conducted the country’s first human clinical trial of a fully implanted wireless BCI.