Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are joining Elon Musk in the hot neural implant business by investing in an American company.
The start-up Synchron, which hosts the two billionaires, wants to develop a brain-machine interface technology for paralyzed people.
Synchron raises $75 million
Once again, we find Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the same race. While the two billionaires are already illustrated by their rivalry in the space field, with Blue Origin for one and SpaceX for the other, now we will find the two men in the brain implants sector.
But where Elon Musk directly co-founded Neuralink, the Amazon boss preferred to invest, along with Bill Gates, in an already existing company: Synchron. The two partners thus participated in a funding round led by ARCH Venture Partners, which raised 75 million euros.
A great success for Synchron which, since its creation in 2016 by neurologist Thomas Oxley, has raised 145 million dollars, while Neuralink, which hopes to test its implants on humans soon, has at the same time raised 373 millions of dollars.
A therapeutic tool for paralyzed people
But while the two companies work in the same neurotechnology market segment, their ambitions are different. Synchron wishes, with its implant called “Switch”, to allow implanted patients to directly control a computer, which will allow them to communicate.
Elon Musk hopes, in addition to medical use, to one day be able to allow healthy people to receive his implant, with the aim of controlling electronic objects by thought and improving their cognitive abilities. Different aspirations that materialize through different practices. While Neuralink directly accesses the brain of the implanted person, with the risks that one imagines, Synchron goes through the jugular vein in order to place the implant near the cerebral cortex.
Thomas Oxley’s company has also already received Food and Drug Administration approval for clinical trials in 2021, which began in July 2022 with the first implantation of its prosthesis. Researchers will be able to assess the effectiveness of Switch for tasks such as sending email or shopping on the internet.
Sources: The echoes, Digital
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