OpenAI Backs Startup Building Brain Implants to Detect and Treat Cancer

OpenAI's venture arm has put money into a brain implant startup, but this one isn't trying to help paralyzed patients type or speak. Coherence Neuro is building a device designed to detect brain tumors and, eventually, zap them with electrical stimulation to slow their growth.

The OpenAI Startup Fund and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund are among the backers in Coherence's $45 million seed round, according to Wired. The investment is the latest sign of how aggressively AI companies are moving into brain-computer interfaces, devices that read and interpret electrical signals from the brain.

Coherence CEO and cofounder Ben Woodington told Wired there's "growing synergy" between major AI labs and companies decoding the brain. "The idea of capturing data to train better models and use it to optimize treatments is going to be super important," he said. "The AI companies seem to be aligned with this thesis as well — that this novel data source is going to be valuable."

Woodington's pitch for why AI and brain-computer interfaces belong together is straightforward: these devices throw off enormous volumes of raw neural data, far more than any human researcher could sift through manually. AI models are suited to that scale of pattern-matching, whether the goal is linking brain signals to a cursor movement, synthesized speech, or in Coherence's case, the electrical signatures of a growing or shrinking tumor.

A different target than Neuralink

Most brain-computer interface work to date, from Elon Musk's Neuralink to the CTRL-labs wristband Facebook acquired in 2019, has focused on restoring lost function in paralyzed patients. Coherence, based in San Francisco, is pointed somewhere else entirely: cancer.

The company says it has already demonstrated in animal studies that it can detect the subtle electrical signals tied to tumor growth, shrinkage, or recurrence. It's now working to translate that research into human trials.

That human testing has already started in a limited way. This past summer, Coherence briefly placed its implant in the brains of three patients undergoing brain tumor removal surgery at Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia, according to Wired. The device stayed in for about 30 minutes before removal, a short window meant mainly as an initial safety check. Coherence is now moving to a second phase, testing both the recording and stimulation functions of the implant in seven more patients.

The stimulation piece is central to where Coherence wants to end up. The implant is designed to deliver mild electrical pulses intended to stop tumor growth, with the long-term vision being a device that learns over time to recognize cancer signals and respond with real-time treatment. Coherence plans to use its new funding to launch a clinical trial implanting the device long-term in patients with glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive brain cancer, and eventually to build versions targeting cancers elsewhere in the body.

Ian Hathaway, a partner at the OpenAI Startup Fund, framed the bet as a response to that approach rather than to brain implants generally. "Coherence's approach to developing a cancer therapy capable of improving from data is incredibly innovative," he said in a statement. "We are proud to be backing them on this exciting mission."

OpenAI's other brain bet

This isn't OpenAI's first move into brain-computer interfaces. In January, the company announced a direct investment in Merge Labs, a startup cofounded by CEO Sam Altman that emerged from stealth with $252 million in initial funding. Merge Labs is pursuing ultrasound-based technology to decode brain activity, and OpenAI said at the time it believes brain-computer interfaces "will create a natural, human-centered way for anyone to seamlessly interact with AI." The company's name nods to a long-running idea in Silicon Valley that humans and machine intelligence will eventually converge.

Thiel's Founders Fund has its own track record here too, having previously backed both Neuralink and CTRL-labs.

But the Coherence deal appears structured differently than the Merge Labs relationship. When it announced Merge Labs, OpenAI said it would "collaborate with Merge Labs on scientific foundation models and other frontier tools to accelerate progress," signaling a closer technical partnership. Woodington says that's not the arrangement with Coherence. "There's nothing in the contracts or arrangements that would mean that we would share, or they would have access to, any brain data or other health data that we're generating," he told Wired.

That distinction matters. Brain data is about as sensitive as data gets, and questions about who can access it, and under what terms, will only grow louder as more companies in this space take money from AI giants with obvious interests in neural data as a training resource. For now, Coherence is drawing a firm line between taking OpenAI's capital and sharing its patients' data. Whether that line holds as the company scales toward human trials and, eventually, commercial treatment, is the thing worth watching next.