Legend Capital and IDG Capital have jointly led a Series A funding round of over 300 million yuan ($41.8 million) in BCIFlex, a three-year-old Chinese startup developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) following the same technological route as Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
A multi-billion-yuan tech innovation investment fund managed by Legend Capital and bankrolled by China’s National Social Security Fund also co-led the Series A round, according to a statement by BCIFlex.
The Beijing-based startup said it will use the proceeds to accelerate its new-generation tech R&D and fund large-scale clinical trials of its Neuralink-style invasive BCI medical devices.
BCIFlex is focused on developing BCIs for medical applications, potentially helping patients with spinal cord injuries and other neurological conditions where brain-body communication is impaired. Like Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink, the BCIs under BCIFlex’s development require a surgical procedure to implant a device, about the size of a coin, directly into the skull to allow for recording neural activity, and potentially, controlling computers or other external devices.
Despite enormous tech challenges, as well as concerns over misuses and sensitive neural privacy, China is actively developing BCIs, with both governmental and academic institutions showing great interest.
Earlier this month, the Chinese government unveiled a multi-year roadmap to achieve global supremacy in critical technologies by 2027, with BCIs playing a pivotal role in its race against the US. The policy blueprint, jointly released on August 7 by seven ministries, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, mandates that breakthroughs in key areas reach advanced international standards by 2027.
Specifically, it calls for the accelerated adoption of BCIs across sectors like healthcare, industrial manufacturing, and consumption. China aims to cultivate two to three leading BCI players, along with an array of smaller-sized companies in the field by 2030.
As one of China’s first batch of forty-or-so BCI startups, BCIFlex said it has self-developed core components, including compatible software and hardware systems, coding-decoding algorithms, and specialised robots for executing the implantation surgery, with a GMP clinical-grade micro-nano processing factory of over 1,000 square metres (10,763.9 square feet).
The completion of the Series A round brought BCIFlex’s fundraising total since its inception in 2022 to nearly 500 million yuan ($69.7 million), said the startup.
Existing shareholder Yuanbio Venture Capital doubled down on BCIFlex through the deal, alongside continued support from food delivery giant Meituan’s DragonBall Capital and Baidu’s corporate venture capital (CVC) arm Baidu Ventures.
China Life Capital, the fund management platform of state-owned China Life Insurance Group, and the 20-billion-yuan ($2.8 billion) Beijing Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industry Investment Fund, also participated in the deal, according to the statement.
