OpenAI Leads $252 Million Bet on Merge Labs BCIs

Summary

• OpenAI has become the lead investor in Merge Labs, a new brain-computer interface research lab co-founded by Sam Altman that just raised around $250 million in seed funding
• Merge Labs is positioning itself against invasive implant players like Neuralink by pursuing high-bandwidth, non-invasive brain interfaces that blend biology, advanced devices, and AI
• The deal tightens the feedback loop between OpenAI’s software and emerging neural hardware while reigniting debate over Altman’s overlapping roles and the ethics of circular AI investments

Merge Labs steps out of stealth as Silicon Valley’s newest brain-computer interface obsession, backed by a $252 million seed round led by OpenAI alongside Bain Capital and Valve’s Gabe Newell. The lab’s goal is to bridge biological and artificial intelligence over decades, first targeting medical use cases before eventually aiming at consumer-scale, everyday interfaces.

Rather than chasing Neuralink-style surgical implants, Merge Labs is betting on a different stack. The team is developing new BCI architectures that interact with neurons using molecules instead of electrodes and move data with deep-reaching ultrasound, all while avoiding implants in brain tissue. The long-term vision is high-bandwidth, non-invasive neural interfaces that feel more like consumer hardware than clinical gear.

OpenAI’s investment is not just a check. The company has framed BCIs as a crucial next interface layer that can make AI more natural and human-centered, and it plans to feed Merge Labs custom foundation models and AI operating systems tuned to interpret noisy brain signals. In practice, that means OpenAI’s software roadmap and Merge’s hardware ambitions are now tightly coupled around the idea of thought-level interaction with AI.

The launch also escalates the rivalry narrative between Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Merge Labs sits in the same frontier space as Neuralink but is culturally closer to AI-native hardware than traditional medtech, and it plugs directly into OpenAI’s broader push into chips, devices, and human augmentation. At the same time, the fact that OpenAI is heavily backing a company Altman co-founded has triggered fresh scrutiny around governance, conflicts of interest, and who gets to own the neural layer of the future.

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