Director of OpenAI Sam Altman’s modern brain-computer interface startup, Merge Labs, is being spun out of Los Angeles-based nonprofit Forest Neurotech, according to a source with direct knowledge of the plans. It will focus on using ultrasound to read brain activity.
In addition to Altman, WIRED has learned, Forest Neurotech CEO Sumner Norman and chief scientific officer Tyson Aflalo are among the co-founders of Merge Labs, which still operates in stealth mode.
While some details of the merger have been previously reported, this is the first time the company has been associated with Forest Neurotech.
According to the Financial Times, co-founders also include Alex Blania, CEO of World, an Altman-backed digital identity company that makes an eye-scanning orb. The Financial Times was the first to report this earlier this year. report about the existence of Merge Labs and that it is raising $850 million in money.
The name Merge Labs refers to the Silicon Valley concept of “merging”, which is the moment when people connect with machines. Altman wrote about this idea in Blog entry from 2017in which he cited forecasts that the merger could take place as early as 2025 and presented his own theory that the merger had already taken place.
Forest Neurotech, a so-called focused research organization, has been working on an ultrasound-based brain-computer interface for several years. The nonprofit was founded in 2023 out of philanthropic incubator Convergent Research, which is partially funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, his wife Wendy Schmidt, and billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.
Forest and Convergent declined to comment.
Mikhail Shapiro, a Caltech researcher who has The Verge reportedwas employed at Merge Labs and is currently an advisor to Forest Neurotech. Norman, who earned his PhD in neural engineering at Caltech, worked closely with Shapiro during his postdoctoral work; According to his LinkedIn, Aflalo was previously executive director of the T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center at Caltech.
Merge will join Elon Musk’s Neuralink and a growing number of other startups developing brain-computer interfaces, or devices that collect brain data and turn it into actionable results. Academic researchers have been experimenting with these devices for decades, but recent advances in artificial intelligence and the hardware used to record brain signals have made the technology more commercially viable.
According to the Financial Times report Merge’s goal as of earlier this year was to raise $250 million, and Altman is a co-founder of the company but is not personally investing in it. Altman previously invested in Musk’s Neuralink.