MintNeuro Raises $5M to Scale Chips for Brain-Computer Interfaces

MintNeuro, a London semiconductor company that designs chips for brain implants and other neural devices, has raised $5 million to bring its products to market. Odyssey Ventures led the round, the company announced, with participation from 33East, JSK Investments, Alumni Ventures, Empirical Ventures, Jumpspace Ventures and earlier investors.

The Imperial College London spinout is positioning itself as a supplier to the fast-growing neurotechnology industry, selling the chips that other companies build their devices around.

What MintNeuro Makes

Every device that reads from or stimulates the nervous system depends on chips to sense electrical signals, process them and deliver stimulation in response. Companies building those devices have generally faced two unappealing options: use generic components that were never designed for the job, or spend years and significant capital developing custom chips of their own.

MintNeuro offers a third route. It has built a modular semiconductor platform designed specifically for neural devices, covering neural sensing, signal processing and stimulation. The chips support closed-loop systems, which monitor nerve or brain activity and adjust stimulation in real time, and they are intended for both implants and wearables.

For a device maker, buying a purpose-built chip can remove one of the longest and riskiest steps in development.

Customers and Early Traction

MintNeuro has delivered working silicon to partners and reached key integration milestones with research groups. Its most significant commercial step so far is a multi-year chip supply agreement with Motif Neurotech, a company developing minimally invasive brain stimulation devices. It also works with Amber Therapeutics.

A supply agreement matters in this business. Medical device makers do not change core components lightly, since each one has to be validated as part of a regulated product. Once a chip is designed in, it tends to stay.

The Team Behind MintNeuro

The company is led by CEO and co-founder Dorian Haci. Professor Tim Denison, a prominent figure in neural engineering, serves as chair.

"Every neural device depends on the chips inside it," Haci said in the announcement, adding that the goal is to make MintNeuro the semiconductor platform the global neurotechnology industry builds on.

How MintNeuro Will Use the $5M

The funding will be used to grow the engineering and commercial teams, bring products to market, support customer adoption and expand the company's presence in the United States, where many of the best-funded neurotechnology companies are based.

Why the MintNeuro Funding Matters

Brain-computer interfaces have drawn intense attention and large funding rounds, mostly for the companies building complete implant systems. Behind those headline names is a broader field of startups working on treatments for conditions ranging from epilepsy and Parkinson's disease to depression and incontinence.

Most of those companies are small, and few have the resources to design their own semiconductors. That creates an opening for a specialist supplier, much as chip designers in other industries sell standardized components to many device makers at once.

MintNeuro's bet is that neurotechnology is maturing into an industry with a supply chain, not just a handful of vertically integrated pioneers. If that proves right, the companies providing shared building blocks could capture value across the whole sector, whichever device makers ultimately succeed.

Source

PR Newswire — "MintNeuro raises $5 million to scale purpose-built chip platform for neural devices and brain-computer interfaces"