By Xiao Luyu, Edited by Yang Xuran
We are living in an era of rapid technological transformation.
Hot fields such as AI, robotics, and gene editing are redefining "humanity" to some extent.
The brain-computer interface (BCI) track is particularly prominent in its ability to "transform humans." It simultaneously carries multiple narratives of healing, enhancement, connection, and immortality, any of which is sufficient to support the imagination of a trillion-dollar market.
As the robotics sector faces regulatory scrutiny and a flood of true and false rumors, BCI companies with even less mature technologies and business models have also begun their sprint for IPOs.
Financing Boom
This year, the capitalization process in the BCI track has significantly accelerated. Earlier this month, non-invasive BCI company Shuli Innovation completed its tutoring registration with the Shanghai Securities Regulatory Bureau, officially launching its SSE STAR Market IPO process, with Huatai United Securities as the sponsor.
This is the third BCI company to take a key step towards an IPO, following Neuracle's SSE STAR Market IPO application being accepted and BrainCo's confidential filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Among the three, Neuracle has the most advanced listing progress. In March this year, its "Implantable Brain-Computer Interface Hand Motor Function Compensation System" was approved for market by the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA), becoming the world's first invasive BCI medical device to obtain a registration certificate. In June, the company's SSE STAR Market IPO application was accepted, planning to raise CNY 2.5 billion.
Shuli Innovation's technology route is mainly non-invasive, with products focusing on limb motor dysfunction, consciousness and cognitive disorders, and neurodevelopmental disorders caused by central nervous system injuries.
The company completed a CNY 160 million Series B+ financing round in January this year, followed by a Series C round of hundreds of millions of CNY in February, and completed its IPO tutoring in September, demonstrating an equally rapid pace of capital operations.
In fact, the financing enthusiasm in the primary market of the BCI track this year has been quite astonishing. The financing amount in Q1 has already exceeded the total for the whole year of 2025. In the first half of the year, there were over 60 financing events in total, with the total amount breaking through CNY 7 billion.
Among them, BrainCo's Series B+ financing amount reached as high as CNY 2 billion, setting a new record for the largest single financing in the domestic BCI field.
Jieti Medical secured a CNY 500 million strategic financing round led by Alibaba and followed by Tencent, marking the first joint investment layout of Alibaba and Tencent in the BCI field.
Even more striking is that Gestalt, established just in 2026, completed two financing rounds within half a year and secured CNY 570 million in funding, despite having no products or clinical data yet.
The BCI is a typical cash-burning track, where leading companies have long relied on equity financing to survive. Catalyzed by national policies, the "two-way rush" between enterprises and investment institutions can be said to be in full swing.
However, investment institutions are not philanthropists. Taking Neuracle as an example, the company has a valuation adjustment mechanism (VAM) agreement with its investors, stipulating that if it fails to go public by the end of 2028, the founding shareholders will bear the repurchase pressure alone, and the listing valuation must not be lower than CNY 5 billion, with a financing amount of no less than CNY 500 million.
In a sense, an IPO has never been an optional choice for BCI companies.
Misalignment of Market Buzz
An intriguing phenomenon is that the most sought-after BCI companies in the capital market actually have limited buzz for their products in the mass market.
Neuracle holds the world's first invasive registration certificate, but according to its prospectus, the approved invasive product "has not yet contributed to revenue," with over 70% of operating revenue coming from the company's sales of electroencephalogram (EEG) acquisition systems.
The core function of this system is to capture, amplify, and record the weak electrical signals generated by the brain, converting them into data for analysis and use. The main buyers are top domestic universities, research institutes, tertiary hospitals, and rehabilitation institutions, often serving research needs.
Compared with Neuracle, Shuli Innovation's product line is more directly aimed at clinical treatment and rehabilitation. Its business model generates revenue by providing BCI rehabilitation equipment and solutions to hospitals.
At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Shuli Innovation also exhibited products such as the BCI motor nerve function remodeling product suite, BCI electrical stimulation therapy device, BCI digital therapy platform, and EEG acquisition and analysis system.
BrainCo's products have broader application scenarios and cover a wider user base, including hospitals, schools, robotics companies, and individual consumers.
In the medical rehabilitation field, BrainCo has flagship products like the intelligent bionic hand and bionic leg, which can help people with disabilities perform various fine movements. In the consumer health field, BrainCo offers products such as the Easleep Brain-Computer Intelligent Sleep Aid and the FocusZen headband, focusing on sleep improvement and stress management.
In fact, to date, the consumer health sector, which starts with sleep and meditation, is precisely the area with the greatest market buzz and the most mature commercialization for BCI products, with almost no exceptions.
In 2025, the shipment volume of consumer-grade headbands for sleep improvement and stress relief reached 1.8 million units, accounting for 47% of the overall market shipments. By Q2 this year, the global quarterly sales of sleep intervention devices exceeded 2 million units for the first time.
The technology route for such BCI products is mainly non-invasive. The product forms (headbands, headphones, patches) are closer to ordinary consumer electronics, resulting in low user decision-making costs and easier purchase conversion. Although the pricing is concentrated at CNY 1,000-5,000, which is 10 to 20 times that of traditional sleep-aid products, they have still become new favorites in the market.
However, these products with greater market buzz and a relatively better consumer base are often considered unable to tell "sexy" stories like "the next-generation computing platform" in the capital market narrative. Therefore, it is difficult for them to obtain the same level of valuation premium as invasive BCI companies.
Lessons from the Past
Behind the misalignment of market buzz lies the reflection of the misalignment in the financing and investment functions of China's primary and secondary markets.
The narrative logic of invasive BCI redefines the underlying interface of human-computer interaction. The market imagination space is at the trillion-dollar level, and there are clear milestones such as Class III medical device certificates from the NMPA and clinical trial endpoints, giving various capitals a strong impulse to "take a gamble."
The narrative of non-invasive BCI is more like making a more user-friendly hardware in existing scenarios. For capital, this implies a somewhat limited ceiling and a competition landscape that is too easily foreseeable. It also lacks the spotlight of Sino-US competition and domestic substitution, resulting in relatively lower attractiveness and valuation premiums.
However, the robotics industry has just provided a warning reference: when the main customers are only major research institutes rather than the general public, what supports the valuation even if the company goes public quickly?
So, what kind of BCI product form is more likely to survive and achieve profitability? From current progress, the semi-invasive/interventional route deserves close attention.
A research report by Southwest Securities points out that semi-invasive BCI, implanted in the epidural space or intravascularly, balances signal quality and risk. It is expected to usher in a commercial explosion first in the field of paralysis rehabilitation and is more suitable for consumer-grade iterative needs in the long term. Neuracle's NEO system belongs to this category of products.
In the consumer health field, a more competitive form might not be cooler headbands, but seamlessly integrating EEG sensing into daily devices that users already have wearing habits for, such as headphones, earbuds, and glasses. This makes the value of BCI products additive rather than substitutive, greatly reducing the education and decision-making costs for users.
Looking further ahead, the competitiveness of consumer-grade BCI will depend on whether it can move from "monitoring" to "intervention." Merely telling users "your concentration has dropped" has limited value; only by triggering real-time acoustic or microcurrent interventions when detecting a lack of attention to form a closed loop can true user stickiness be created.
Perhaps "the flesh suffers, but the machine ascends" is also a future that will eventually arrive. But before that, the race for the first BCI IPO must still respect the laws of market development; otherwise, the destructiveness to this track will be too great.
Conclusion
After the large-scale listing of power battery and NEV (New Energy Vehicle) companies, the entire industry experienced explosive development. Of course, this was also accompanied by massive policy support. We can feel the entire process of policy promotion + capital assistance + industrial surge + consumer payment. The entire industrial chain, including consumers, has benefited to varying degrees.
As AI (Artificial Intelligence) enters a historical period of rapid development as an industry, policy promotion once again plays a key role. The optimism and betting of capital are even more frenzied compared to the new energy era.
AI products are becoming increasingly mature, and user habits are gradually forming. However, the problem is that, to date, apart from programming and some office applications, the entire AI industry still lacks sufficient profitable monetization channels. Related companies represented by Zhipu and Minimax were enthusiastically favored by capital, but subsequently experienced a noticeable cooling down.
The situation in the robotics field is more complex than AI applications, and capital is even more frenzied than during the AI large model stage. Countless capitals intervened with heavy positions on a super-large scale in the early stages of industry development. The listing of Unitree once pushed the industry bubble to its peak, only to see its market value halved shortly after going public.
The development of BCI companies is at an even earlier stage compared to robotics, especially for invasive BCI. However, relevant listing news has been circulated multiple times. Both at the policy and capital levels, there is a push for some companies in this field to explore going public, even though they are overall still in a very early stage of commercialization.
It can be seen that from NEVs to robotics companies, and then to BCI companies, the speed of financing and listing for tech companies is constantly accelerating. The visible hand and the invisible hand work together to jointly promote the rapid development of these industries.
From the perspective of policy and industry, cultivating and developing emerging industries is understandable; from the perspective of capital, investing early, profiting early, and exiting early are inevitable for profit-seeking; from the perspective of practitioners, obtaining more capital and policy support also provides greater room for survival. Apart from having to start facing operational requirements and pressures, the overall benefits are relatively greater.
From the perspective of retail investors, having an additional direction for speculation and some targets seems to meet the demand for chasing more cutting-edge market hotspots. Without considering subsequent losses, this is also a clear demand.
Compared to "respecting the laws," for various market entities, tangible profits are more practical. Matters that benefit multiple parties are easier to carry out smoothly, even if all negative impacts will unfold implicitly without being noticed.
This article is an in-depth value article from the content team of "Juchao WAVE." Welcome to follow us on multiple platforms.