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Elon Musk’s implantable brain wave reading chip company, Neuralink, has raised $43 million in venture capital, according to an SEC filing.
According to this week’s filing, the company increased its early August tranche, which Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led, from $280 million to $323 million. The filing lists 32 investors.
Recently, Neuralink hasn’t disclosed its valuation. However, Reuters reported in June that privately executed stock trades valued the company at $5 billion.
Neuralink, founded in 2016, has developed a sewing machine-like device to implant ultra-thin brain threads. Threads connect to a custom chip with electrodes that read neuron groups.
Brain-signal-reading implants are decades old. Neuralink’s main innovation is wireless implants and more electrodes.
After being rejected, Neuralink got FDA approval for human clinical trials in May and began recruiting participants under an investigational device exemption.
However, Neuralink is under fire for its toxic workplace culture and unethical research.
Anonymous former employees told Fortune in January 2022 that Musk encouraged junior employees “to email issues and complaints to him directly” to undermine management in a “culture of blame and fear.” According to Stat News, only three of the eight founding scientists remained at the company by August 2020 due to internal conflict between rushed timelines and the slow pace of science.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) accused Neuralink and UC Davis, its former research partner, of mistreating several monkeys testing Neuralink hardware, causing psychological distress and chronic infections from surgeries in 2022. Reuters and Wired reported that Musk’s demands for fast results rushed testing, resulting in electrode installation issues like partial paralysis and brain swelling.
For nearly a year, the USDA looked into Neuralink for violations of animal welfare. The USDA found “no evidence” of animal welfare violations in the startup’s trials other than a 2019 self-reported incident, but the PCRM disagreed.
In November 2023, U.S. lawmakers asked the SEC to investigate Neuralink for concealing the deaths of at least a dozen animals implanted with its implants.
