According to Wired, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s new brain-computer interface startup, Merge Labs, is being spun out of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Forest Neurotech. The company, which is still in stealth mode, will focus on using ultrasound to read brain activity and is co-founded by Forest Neurotech’s CEO Sumner Norman and chief scientific officer Tyson Aflalo. Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported Merge Labs was raising money at a valuation of $850 million, aiming for a $250 million round. The name references the Silicon Valley concept of “the merge,” where humans meld with machines, an idea Altman wrote about in a 2017 blog post. The startup is also linked to Alex Blania, CEO of the Altman-backed Worldcoin, and Caltech researcher Mikhail Shapiro, who is an adviser to Forest Neurotech.
The Nonprofit to For-Profit Pipeline
Here’s the thing that’s really interesting about this story. It’s not just another rich tech guy starting a neurotech company. Merge Labs is being spun out of a nonprofit. Forest Neurotech was launched in 2023 from a philanthropic incubator called Convergent Research, which is funded by heavyweights like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and billionaire Ken Griffin. So you have this “focused research organization” doing foundational work for a few years, and then—bam—it becomes the seed for a venture-backed startup valued at nearly a billion dollars before it even really announces what it’s doing. It’s a fascinating model. Basically, the nonprofit de-risks the early, super-speculative science, and the for-profit entity takes the promising tech to market. You have to wonder if this is going to become a more common playbook for tackling hard tech problems.
The Ultrasound Angle
Now, why ultrasound? Everyone’s heard of Neuralink and its invasive electrodes. But Merge, following Forest Neurotech’s work, is betting on a different path. Ultrasound for reading brain activity is a lot less invasive than implanting a chip in your cortex. Think of it more like a sophisticated, high-tech hat than brain surgery. The technical hurdles are massive—you’re trying to decode incredibly complex signals through the skull—but the potential upside for patient safety and adoption is huge. If they can make it work with decent resolution, it changes the whole game. It moves BCI from a “last resort for the severely disabled” technology to something with much broader potential applications. That’s probably a big part of that sky-high valuation.
Altman’s Grand Vision
And let’s talk about Sam Altman for a second. The guy is building an empire that’s starting to look like a bet on the entire future of human-computer interaction. You’ve got OpenAI (obviously), you’ve got Worldcoin with its eye-scanning orbs for digital identity, and now you’ve got Merge Labs aiming to read your brainwaves. He even wrote about “the merge” back in 2017. This isn’t a scattered investment portfolio. It looks like a coherent, if incredibly ambitious, strategy. Each piece potentially feeds into the other. What if your AI assistant could read your mental state to better help you? What if a secure identity was tied to your unique neural patterns? The synergies are wild to think about. It also puts him in direct, if friendly, competition with his old pal Elon Musk. Altman invested in Neuralink, but now he’s building his own horse in the race.
The New Neurotech Landscape
So we’re watching a whole new industry category heat up incredibly fast. It’s not just Neuralink and Merge. There’s a growing pack of startups all chasing different approaches to the BCI problem. And the sudden viability isn’t just about better hardware. It’s about AI. We now have the algorithms that might actually make sense of the noisy, chaotic data coming from a brain. That’s the real unlock. The hardware captures the signal, but the AI software is what translates it into something useful. This shift is creating opportunities for specialized hardware providers across the tech spectrum. For instance, companies that manufacture rugged, reliable computing hardware for industrial settings, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US supplier of industrial panel PCs, are seeing their core technologies become relevant in new, demanding fields like medical and research tech. The race isn’t just to build the implant or the helmet—it’s to build the entire stack, from the sensor to the silicon to the software. And with Altman’s new venture, that race just got another very well-connected contender.
