NRF pours $54m into Neuralink rival Synchron
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The news: The Australian government’s National Reconstruction Fund (NRF) has poured $54 million into Synchron’s latest funding round as it seeks to gain US regulatory approval.
The numbers: The Albanese government’s $54 million stake in the New York-based biotech forms part of a $305 million Series D funding round led by Double Point Ventures, alongside existing investors ARCH Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Bezos Expedition, NTI and METIS.
The financing brings Synchron’s total funding to $545 million, valuing the company at “about USD1 billion” CEO Tom Oxley told Forbes Australia.
The context: Synchron, which relocated from Melbourne to New York in 2021 as it was unable to raise sufficient funding locally, plans to use the new capital to fund its final phase of clinical trials with the goal of gaining US regulatory approval. The trials are to accelerate the commercialisation of the company’s first-generation Stentrode BCI platform.
The NRF said in a statement on Thursday that as Synchron moves from clinical trials to large scale commercial deployment, the company will seek additional funding to help establish a commercial hub in Australia which would support sales, marketing, and distribution functions for Australia and APAC.
“Investing in Synchron diversifies Australia’s economy and contributes to its sovereign medical capability by bringing parts of the company back home to Australia and helping to build a robust local biotech ecosystem that creates highly skilled jobs in the future”, the NRF said.
While Synchron’s financing amounts to less that a quarter of that raised by rival Neuralink, Synchron had its first devices in humans to operate computers using only their thoughts by 2019 – five years before Musk’s firm.
Synchron’s technology is unique as its brain-computer interface can be implanted onto the surface of the brain via a blood vessel, effectively allowing the stentrode to read the patient’s mind and allow them to control devices, without requiring brain surgery to implant.
“There is a lot of capital flying into [these interfaces], and we are in a unique position of not going through the skull, and hopefully getting to market first,” Oxley told the AFR. “What has the tech titans excited about this space is there appears to be a large market for this technology,” Oxley added.
Synchron’s Stentrode devices have been placed in 10 patients with paralysis across clinical trials in the US and Australia.
The sources: National Reconstruction Fund, AFR, Forbes
