Bridge Neurotech Raises $13.5M for Non-Invasive Ultrasound BCI

Bridge Neurotech emerged from stealth on Tuesday, October 7, 2026, with $13.5M in funding to build a brain-computer interface that reads brain activity with ultrasound through the skull — no surgery, no implant. The company also announced a research partnership with Butterfly Network, the chip-based ultrasound device maker, and is already enrolling volunteers for its first human study in Redwood City, California.

General Catalyst, reMind Capital, Sunflower Capital and Scott Sandell backed the round, founder Will Biederman wrote in a founder's letter.

What is Bridge actually building?

The company is developing a functional ultrasound imaging platform, known as fUSI. AI models then decode the brain signals the platform picks up. Biederman founded the Silicon Valley startup this year.

WIRED, which reported the launch first, said Bridge plans a wearable device. This positions the startup directly against Merge Labs, the Sam Altman-backed company also building an ultrasound-powered interface.

The first human study is open to healthy adults aged 18 and older. Adults who have undergone a cranioplasty with a PEEK or Longeviti implant can also participate. Volunteers perform simple tasks while the device measures their brain activity, according to Bridge's website.

The distinction matters for clinical readers: this is investigational work in healthy volunteers, not an FDA-cleared diagnostic or therapeutic device. The recording modality is transcranial functional ultrasound imaging — not scalp EEG, ECoG or implanted electrodes.

Who is Will Biederman?

As a PhD student at Berkeley, Biederman developed the chip that Neuralink used in its first implants. He then spent nearly a decade at Verily and Google working on health technology, and later co-founded Forest Neurotech, where he led work on the first miniaturized fUSI device for imaging the human brain.

He frames the market gap bluntly. "Implanted BCIs have reached only around one hundred people," Biederman wrote.

Implant makers such as Paradromics and Neuralink place electrodes in the brain. Others, including China's BrainCo, sell wearable brain tech that reads signals from outside the head. Bridge falls into the second camp — but with ultrasound rather than electrophysiology as its sensing method.

What does the Butterfly deal cover?

Bridge will license Butterfly's Ultrasound-on-Chip technology through Butterfly Embedded, the unit that licenses its chips to other companies. The multi-year agreement includes payments to Butterfly for technology access and for development milestones. Bridge has also committed to buy Butterfly hardware. Neither company disclosed the deal's value.

"Butterfly has already brought ultrasound onto a fully integrated semiconductor chip, giving us a powerful and programmable foundation as we work toward real-time, non-invasive interaction with the brain," Biederman said.

Butterfly sells the iQ3, a handheld whole-body ultrasound probe. Researchers have also used ultrasound to build a wristband that tracks finger positions.

"Innovators like Bridge are exploring surgery-free approaches to broaden access, and we're proud our Ultrasound-on-Chip technology can help advance that pursuit," said Joseph DeVivo, Butterfly's chief executive.

Why it matters for the reading room

For neurophysiology teams, the launch signals a second well-funded push — after Merge Labs — to decode brain activity with ultrasound rather than electrical recordings. The enrollment criteria also hint at a technical constraint: the study explicitly includes patients with PEEK or Longeviti cranioplasty implants, materials that can pass ultrasound in ways native skull bone does not.

Nothing in the announced study involves clinical decision-making, epilepsy monitoring or intraoperative use. The immediate relevance is methodological: functional ultrasound offers a hemodynamic-adjacent signal with high spatial resolution, and the next months of healthy-volunteer data will show whether transcranial decoding holds up outside animal and intracranial settings.

With $13.5M in hand, a chip supply partner, and enrollment underway, Bridge now faces the harder test — turning non-invasive ultrasound recordings into decoded brain signals in living, awake humans.