Neuralink

Liquid AI

Neuralink

Neuralink doesn't have a traditional revenue model yet — it's still in clinical trials. The near-term plan is medical devices sold to hospitals and clinics for treating neurological conditions.

Brain-computer interfaces for paralysis, ALS, blindness, and other conditions would be reimbursed by insurance and healthcare systems, similar to cochlear implants or deep brain stimulators.

The long-term vision is consumer neurotechnology — healthy people choosing to get brain implants for enhanced cognition, communication, or AI interaction. This is years or decades away and faces massive regulatory and ethical hurdles.

But if it works, the total addressable market is literally every human brain on the planet.

The surgical robot is potentially a separate revenue stream. Even if the implant itself doesn't dominate, the precision robotics technology developed for neural surgery could be licensed to other medical device companies.

Neuralink has also built custom chip fabrication capabilities that could have applications beyond brain interfaces.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI builds foundation models, the big general-purpose brains that power chatbots and other AI tools. The difference is efficiency.

Their models, called Liquid Foundation Models, are designed to do more with far less memory and computing power. Companies pay to use them, either through a cloud API or by running the models on their own machines.

That second option matters. A bank or a hospital often cannot send private data to someone else's server.

Liquid AI lets them keep the model in-house. The pitch to a customer is basically this.

You get strong AI without renting a mountain of expensive chips.

Neuralink

Elon Musk had been talking about brain-computer interfaces publicly since at least 2016. His stated motivation was existential: if AI becomes superintelligent, humans need a way to merge with it or risk becoming irrelevant.

The solution, in his mind, was a direct neural link between the human brain and computers.

Neuralink was quietly incorporated in July 2016 in California. Musk recruited a team of eight co-founders — neuroscientists, engineers, and chip designers from institutions like UC Berkeley, MIT, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The founding team included Ben Rapoport, a neurosurgeon who understood both the medical and engineering sides, and Dongjin Seo, who had done PhD research on neural dust (tiny wireless brain sensors).

The company operated in stealth for two years before a 2019 presentation where Musk revealed the vision: a coin-sized device implanted in the skull containing thousands of ultra-thin electrode threads inserted into the brain by a custom-built surgical robot. The threads are thinner than a human hair — roughly 5 microns wide — and each one contains multiple electrodes that read neural signals.

The robot was necessary because no human surgeon could place threads that thin without damaging brain tissue.

Liquid AI

Liquid AI is a spinout from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, better known as CSAIL. The core science came from Ramin Hasani, who spent his PhD studying the nervous system of a tiny worm called C.

elegans. That worm has just 302 neurons and still manages to move, hunt, and react to its world.

Hasani and his collaborators asked a simple question. What if you built an AI that worked more like those neurons and less like a giant static network?

The answer was the liquid neural network, a model whose internal wiring keeps adjusting even after training is done. The team incorporated the company in 2023.

Daniela Rus, who runs CSAIL and is one of the most respected robotics researchers alive, came on as a co-founder. So did Mathias Lechner and Alexander Amini, both longtime research partners of Hasani.

Neuralink

Neuralink's growth strategy is the classic Musk playbook: start with the premium use case that justifies the cost, then scale down. Phase 1 is medical — treat severe neurological conditions where no other option exists.

Quadriplegia, ALS, locked-in syndrome. Patients who literally cannot move or speak are willing to undergo experimental brain surgery.

The FDA granted Breakthrough Device designation in 2020, and the first human trial (PRIME study) began in 2024.

Phase 2 is expanding medical indications — blindness, depression, epilepsy, Parkinson's. Each new condition multiplies the patient population and the regulatory pathway, building clinical evidence along the way.

Phase 3 — the moonshot — is consumer enhancement. Musk has described this as "conceptual telepathy," where you think a message and it sends.

This phase requires proving extraordinary safety over years of medical use first. Nobody is going to electively implant a brain chip unless the medical version has been proven safe for a decade.

Liquid AI

The growth angle is size, or the lack of it. Most frontier models are so heavy they only run in data centers.

Liquid AI aims for models light enough to run on a phone, a car, or a factory robot. That opens doors the giants cannot easily reach.

The AMD partnership pushes the same idea. AMD makes chips, and it wants efficient models that show off its hardware.

So AMD led the Series A and became both an investor and a distribution partner. Liquid AI also releases open models to researchers, which builds a following before the sales team ever makes a call.

Neuralink

The FDA and regulatory approval process is the primary bottleneck. Brain implants are Class III medical devices — the highest risk category.

Every design change, every new indication, requires extensive clinical data. The USDA also investigated Neuralink in 2022 for potential animal welfare violations in their primate testing program, which created PR headaches.

Long-term biocompatibility is an unsolved problem. The brain treats any foreign object as an invader and forms scar tissue around it, which can degrade signal quality over time.

Making an implant that works reliably for decades inside a hostile biological environment is one of the hardest engineering problems in medicine. Neuralink's thread retraction issue in their first human patient — where some threads pulled away from the brain — highlighted how much work remains.

Talent retention has been rocky. Max Hodak, the original president, left in 2021.

Several founding scientists departed. Working for Musk is notoriously demanding, and the timeline pressure on a medical device company clashes with the inherent need for cautious, methodical development.

Liquid AI

The honest problem is Goliath. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta have raised tens of billions of dollars between them.

Liquid AI has raised under $300 million. The transformer architecture those giants use is battle-tested and improving fast.

Liquid AI has to prove its different approach not only works but keeps working as models get bigger. Betting against the most successful design in AI history is bold.

It is also the kind of bet that ends in either a great acquisition or a quiet shutdown, with not much room in between.

Neuralink

The N1 Implant — a coin-sized device (23mm diameter, 8mm thick) implanted flush with the skull containing a custom chip that wirelessly transmits neural data to external devices via Bluetooth. The R1 Robot — a precision surgical system that inserts 64 flexible threads carrying 1,024 electrodes into the brain with micron-level accuracy, avoiding blood vessels using computer vision.

The N1 User App — software that translates neural signals into computer commands, allowing users to control cursors, keyboards, and eventually robotic limbs through thought alone. BCI Software Platform — the signal processing and machine learning stack that decodes raw brain signals into intended actions.

Liquid AI

The main products are the Liquid Foundation Models, a family that ships in several sizes so a customer can pick the smallest one that does the job. The second generation, LFM2, arrived in 2025, including LFM2-VL vision-language models built for phones, laptops, wearables and embedded chips.

The company has leaned hard into on-device AI rather than the cloud. The focus is always the same.

Match the quality of a much larger model while using a fraction of the memory and power.

Neuralink

Elon Musk has been the primary funder, investing hundreds of millions of his personal wealth. The company raised $205 million in a Series C in 2021, then $280 million in a Series D in 2023 led by Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's firm).

A 2024 round reportedly valued the company at $8.9 billion. Google Ventures (GV) and DFJ Growth have also participated.

The investor base is narrow compared to most startups at this valuation.

Liquid AI

It started with a $37.5 million two-stage seed in December 2023 at a $303 million valuation, from OSS Capital, PagsGroup, Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Samsung Next and others. Angels included GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Shopify's Tobi Lütke and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Then AMD Ventures led the $250 million Series A in December 2024, which is unusual because AMD is a chipmaker, not a typical venture fund. That backing gave Liquid AI both money and a hardware ally.

When a major chip company writes the lead check on an efficiency-focused model maker, it signals a bet that the future of AI is not just bigger, it is leaner.