OpenAI's venture capital arm and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund are investing in Coherence Neuro, a San Francisco startup building a brain implant to detect and treat cancer, according to Wired.
The investment is part of a $45 million seed round, which the company's chief executive and cofounder Ben Woodington frames as evidence of "growing synergy" between major AI labs and firms building brain-computer interfaces.
Coherence, founded in 2022 by Woodington and Elise Jenkins, researchers in neuroengineering and neuro-oncology at the University of Cambridge, had previously raised a seed round reported at $10 million in November, led by Artesian and Topology Ventures with Blackbird and Possible Ventures participating.
The company's SOMA platform pairs a wireless implant with wearable hardware and smartphone software to record electrical signals from brain tumors and deliver targeted stimulation in response, with glioblastoma as the lead target.
This summer, Coherence briefly tested the implant's recording capability in three patients undergoing brain tumor removal at Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia, with the device in place for roughly 30 minutes as an initial safety check; it is now testing recording and stimulation in seven more patients.
Woodington said the new funding will support a clinical trial implanting the device long-term in glioblastoma patients, with plans to eventually extend the approach to cancers elsewhere in the body.
He said OpenAI will have no access to the brain data generated, a contractual boundary he distinguished from OpenAI's arrangement with Merge Labs, the brain-computer interface startup cofounded by chief executive Sam Altman that launched in January with $252 million and an explicit plan to collaborate with OpenAI on shared foundation models.
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