2022-08-29 11:37:30
In Part 4 of our series mapping the European startups challenging Elon Musk’s empire, we look at those which are trying to go as far or beyond the feats of Neuralink.
Part 1 is about cars, Part 2 is about the hyperloop, Part 3 is about space tech, and Part 5 explores ways to overcome a fragmented Europe.
What nobody mentioned, however, was that a little British company called
BIOS is doing pretty much the same thing as Neuralink — only in many respects better.
And it’s not just it. Other European companies such as the German
CereGate and Swiss
Mindmaze are outclassing Neuralink in core areas, such as understanding the language of the nervous system and helping people who suffer from neurological disorders. They just lack the marketing might (and financial firepower) of Musk.
North America and Europe are currently global leaders in neurotechnology thanks to their technological infrastructure and world-leading research facilities, according to a recent report.
Universities such as Karolinska in Stockholm, Cambridge in the UK and the University of Freiburg in Germany have all fostered neurotechnology startups, and while Neuralink has capital and press attention others can only dream of, an increasing amount of investment is heading towards European neurotechnology startups. In the last few months alone, Italian startup Wise closed a €15m round, Dutch neurostimulation company Salvia #Bioelectronics raised €26m and German startup CereGate closed an undisclosed Series A round.
In fact, Europe has a long tradition of biohacking and connecting machines to humans going back to the 1990s.
According to Mindmaze’s medical and scientific officer John Krakauer, people are unaware that non-invasive solutions already have the potential to help people with the conditions Neuralink says its technology will treat in the future.
Krakauer, based at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is however impressed by some invasive technological approaches, which have already shown efficacy in deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease and epidural stimulation for spinal cord injury. [...]
As a first step, it makes it possible to control games and computer software with your gaze. But according to the company it is not an eye tracker as such but will actually be able to be used with your eyes closed in the future. Instead it understands which objects you want to move.
The next step could almost be something pretty impressive – it will be able to decode visual imagination, such as those appearing in your memories, dreams and your imagination, according to the company. https://sifted.eu/articles/neuralink-competitors-europe/
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