Price inquiries continue to rise, premium bidding for old shares. Various capital sources are rushing to acquire brain-machine interface projects.

Special Topic: China’s asset security attributes stand out; a strong or steady long-term bull market for A-shares is within reach

“Over the past period of time, I proactively reached out to funds seeking to acquire old shares of Qiangnao Technology—about a dozen of them, all top-tier institutions—and I turned down many of them.” Liu Dan, one of the early investors in Qiangnao Technology and a well-known investment figure in the life sciences and technology sector, said in an interview with Securities Times reporter, “And the inquiry kept rising all the way, with even expressions of interest at prices higher than the price for the new capital increase.”

In the primary market, transfers of old shares are usually discounted compared with new shares. The anomalous trading of old shares in brain-computer interface companies reflects, in essence, the unprecedented heat in investment and financing in this sector: industrial capital and internet tech giants have moved in one after another. However, the reporter learned in interviews that while capital is scrambling for brain-computer interface projects, different capital groups place varying emphasis on different technical routes.

Brain-computer interface companies

Can basically raise funds quickly

Brain-computer interfaces have been included in this year’s Government Work Report as a future industry. Coupled with technological breakthroughs such as the approval for the listing of the world’s first invasive brain-computer interface, Class III medical device, the domestic brain-computer interface primary-market has ushered in a “DeepSeek moment.”

On March 13, Stairway Medicine, a star start-up in brain-computer interfaces, announced the completion of a 500 million yuan strategic financing round; within the past year, the company’s cumulative financing exceeded 1.1 billion yuan. On March 12, Formata Technology announced the completion of a 150 million yuan angel round, setting a new highest record for angel round financing in China’s brain-computer interface field. In January, Qiangnao Technology completed another round of financing of about 2 billion yuan, setting a single-transaction financing record in China’s non-invasive brain-computer interface sector.

IT Juzi data shows that, as of March 19, within the year there have been 17 investment and financing events in the brain-computer interface sector, with a total amount of 3.8B yuan, far exceeding the 1.46B yuan financing scale for all of 2025.

Liu Dan said: At the current level of heat, start-ups whose founding teams have a basic foundation in the brain-computer interface industry are basically pursued, enabling them to secure rapid financing. In particular, sub-sector leading enterprises have become the mainstream funds’ targets for “checking for gaps and filling in the blanks”—“some top funds have entered the sector through methods such as acquiring old shares.”

Tao Ding Investment is one of the lead investors in Formata Technology’s angel round financing. Its partner, Lin Zhencheng, told the reporter that the financing round is progressing quickly and has received oversubscription; currently, multiple other institutions are still lining up to invest in subsequent rounds. “The brain-computer interface has become the focus of investment and financing in the medical industry. We started researching and planning this sector two years ago, and we’ve already invested in four or five projects. There are still two or three more projects to put out in the future,” he said.

In this wave of primary-market investment and financing in brain-computer interfaces, the capital flowing in first is still top-tier companies. Large-scale financings are mostly concentrated in enterprises with high technical barriers and fast clinical progress. Mao Shuo, executive director of Qiming Venture Capital, said in an interview with reporters that institutions generally favor four types of targets: enterprises with robust core technology, especially those with clear core advantages in implanted and flexible brain-computer interface technologies; founding teams that combine top academic backgrounds with capabilities for industrialization; leading clinical progress, able to advance model verification and clinical trials, with clear approval and commercialization pathways; and clear deployment scenarios in movement decoding and treatment of neurological diseases, among others.

This is also the reason Qiming Venture Capital keeps investing in Stairway Medicine. “The founding team of Stairway Medicine has extremely strong professionalism and growth potential. It has achieved the development of the first miniaturized implanted, flexible brain-computer interface system in China, and completed a series of rigorous preclinical validations. At the same time, it is also actively promoting the formation of industry standards and approval pathways,” Mao Shuo said. “We can see a clear future vision in Stairway Medicine. It has already completed the first clinical implantation for movement decoding in China. At the same time, it has also set clear technical routes in areas such as language decoding, visual reconstruction, and fine control of neurological diseases.”

Companies in the brain-computer interface ecosystem—subcomponents, materials, and so on—have also become niche tracks for capital allocation. Yang Bo, managing director of ShuiMu WuTong Venture Capital, told reporters that flexible electrodes for invasive brain-computer interfaces, signal processing systems, chips, implant equipment, and other companies with higher technical thresholds are favored by capital.

Industrial capital and internet tech giants enter in succession

In this financing boom in the brain-computer interface sector, participants are becoming even more diversified. Yang Bo observed that, previously, the brain-computer interface industry was largely a frontier niche track that was of interest to only a few medical device funds and hard-tech funds. Now it has entered the purview of more comprehensive funds, industrial capital, local state-owned capital, and internet tech giants.

In the lineup of Qiangnao Technology’s 2 billion yuan financing, there are investment institutions such as IDG Capital and Hualon International, as well as industrial giants such as BlueFocus Technology and Lingyi Zhizao. Strategic investors also include Runze Technology, Huazhu Group, and TAL Education Group, among others. Among Formata Technology’s investors, there is also support from industrial players such as Fourier Intelligence. In Stairway Medicine’s 500 million yuan financing, Alibaba leads the round and Tencent participates again as a follow-on investor. The company is also the first target that Alibaba and Tencent have laid out in the brain-computer interface field.

In Lin Zhencheng’s view, as industrial capital and internet tech giants begin to plan the brain-computer interface sector, the industry will see an influx of more long-cycle capital and resources from the industrial chain. This will further promote the development of foundational research, product development, continuous iteration, and scenario deployment in the underlying layer of the brain-computer interface industry.

With industrial capital and internet tech giants moving in, the bigger focus lies in business integration and synergy. Multiple interviewees believe that the development direction of brain-computer interfaces cannot be limited only to applications in the clinical domain. In the future, the imaginative space for human-computer interaction applications in non-medical fields such as entertainment, education, health, and industrial applications will be larger.

Mao Shuo said that brain-computer interfaces are not only cutting-edge medical technologies, but also an important direction where life sciences and information technology deeply converge. Taking Stairway Medicine as an example, he analyzed how internet tech giants have accumulated deep experience in multi-modal large models, computational power support, intelligent hardware, and ecosystem development and deployment. They can combine their advantages with Stairway Medicine’s strengths in core brain-computer hardware technologies and clinical transformation, and coordinate to build a new generation of brain-computer interface systems and a more advanced application ecosystem together. “This is both a strong support for medical innovation and a forward-looking layout of core capabilities for next-generation human-computer interaction.”

“Approval for the world’s first invasive brain-computer interface, Class III medical device, and the entry of internet tech giants into brain-computer interfaces can be seen as a landmark—the turning point as the industry gradually moves toward commercialization,” Lin Zhencheng said.

Differences in technical routes become apparent

Institutional layouts differ in emphasis

Although various institutions generally have positive views on the brain-computer interface sector, they differ in their emphasis on different technical routes and sub-sectors.

Mao Shuo said that Qiming Venture Capital will focus on companies with robust technology barriers and clear clinical deployment value. It will place priority on core areas such as implanted brain-computer interfaces, neural modulation, and signal decoding. It will primarily select enterprises that have top interdisciplinary teams, leading clinical progress, and clear technical roadmaps and commercialization pathways—especially founding teams that can realize a transition from scientists to entrepreneurs and that combine academic strength with industrialization capabilities. At the same time, it will also pay attention to high-quality targets across the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain to round out its investment layout.

In the medium term, Liu Dan is even more optimistic about the future development and application of semi-invasive technical routes. “Semi-invasive is like being in the midfield position on a soccer field. Application scenarios can be entered in medical settings, or also in non-medical settings. You can advance and attack, or hold and defend—relatively flexible.”

Yang Bo has recently been paying attention to projects in the brain-computer interface sector as well. He told the reporter that he is both looking at investment opportunities in top-tier star projects and watching early-stage technology-driven companies with high growth potential—such as frontier tech projects related to brain-computer interfaces, including electrodes, signal processing systems, algorithm development, and the integration of brain-computer interfaces with embodied intelligence.

In his view, in the area of non-invasive brain-computer projects, there are medical devices within a serious clinical medical system, as well as non-invasive brain-computer products for scenarios such as mental and emotional health, education, and 3C applications. But the scale of investment attraction for these companies still cannot compare with the leading companies in invasive brain-computer interfaces.

“Future development directions for brain-computer interfaces cannot be limited to applications in the clinical field. We look forward to policy support systems further extending toward fundamental research, breakthroughs in key core technologies, and multi-scenario integrated applications,” Yang Bo said in an interview. “Especially in directions such as the integration of AI and brain-computer interfaces, coordination between brain-computer interfaces and embodied intelligence, and validation of new human-computer interaction scenarios, we look forward to seeing more systematic top-level design, special support, and supporting industrial policy.”

While closely watching ongoing breakthroughs in invasive brain-computer interface technology, Lin Zhencheng is also strongly optimistic about the vast application space and potential of non-invasive brain-computer interfaces. He has already laid out medical projects in areas such as depression, Parkinson’s disease, pain, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease, distributed across different application scenarios in hospitals and at home. At the same time, he also sees large commercial potential for brain-computer interfaces in non-medical fields in the future. Some research teams are already exploring commercialization and deployment—for example, brain-controlled drones, brain-controlled cars, and brain-controlled games. “Brain-computer interfaces belong to a track with a long slope and deep snow, and we will strongly allocate resources to this track.”

(Source: Securities Times)

A wealth of information and precise interpretation—available on the Sina Finance app