Funding and Framing Impact in the Neuro Frontier
Representations 04: Philanthropy, FRO, Connectomes, ARIA
Representations is a new limited series exploring neurotech’s evolving business frontier. This is produced in partnership with PL Neuro, a project by Protocol Labs. PL Neuro accelerates neurotechnology and neuro AI through field building, strategic investment, and scientific research. Their worldview is deeply technical, yet wholly focused on enabling futures of human flourishing. Over the coming months we’ll explore key topics, trends, and themes, featuring experts from PL Neuro’s ecosystem and market insights from Neurotech Futures’ platform.
Welcome back to Representations. Last time we explored hiring and company culture as primary drivers of neural engineering’s future. Driven by leadership, infrastructure and investability spin the business flywheel of data strategy in BCI and beyond.
The latest fundraising tally brings 2026’s year-to-date investments to $700 million+ across 25 implanted BCI companies, from 57 investors in 10+ countries, including 20+ from China.
As the United States marks its 250th year of nationhood, it faces global competition shaped by complex geopolitical and technological shifts. The AI revolution is creating a historic opportunity to establish global leadership in neuroscience that spans technological, health, economic, and national interests.
But leading this paradigm shift is neither the exclusive mandate of private investors, nor solely a federal program to administer. There is a growing role for non-profits to de-risk early-stage R&D plays, advance strategic pockets of clinical research, and launch otherwise non-backable moonshots. In this issue, we’ll explore the growing opportunities for impact investing to drive innovation on the global stage.
Imagining Neurotech as Public Goods
A viral essay titled “The third wave of American philanthropy” explored how historic valuations and IPOs will bring a flood of money into philanthropy, to the tune of $37-100 billion per year. Author Nan Ransohoff added context for what $50 billion per year could fund: “6 Gates Foundations (~$9B/yr); 67 Coefficient Givings (~$1B/yr); 100 GiveWells (~$500M/yr); 333 Arc Institutes (~$150M/yr); 5,000 Institutes for Progress (~$10M/yr).”
This is not a cause for celebration, but preparation. “We are orders of magnitude off from having the great organizations needed to absorb the money that’s coming,” Ransohoff writes. In calling for a “Silicon Valley for public goods,” she outlines the need for “philanthropic startups” who can deploy $50 billion per year effectively, while standing up a prestige brand that has staying power.
Comparing the ratio of total employee counts to deployed capital at leading VCs like Khosla, Sequoia, Greylock, A16Z with early models of “philanthropy VCs” offers a blueprint for where to start. This new wave of philanthropy will require organizations with the internal capacity to fund thousands to tens of thousands of grants per year, as well as the wherewithal to hire employees effectively, coordinate with other investment vehicles, regrant to other firms, start family offices, and find independent allocators.
Beyond the “how,” the looming question is simple and complicated at once: What should this money fund? Ransohoff argues that vision is in short supply, urging all of us to make fundable problems “more legible.” This requires framing new projects to appeal to new funders who hold deep beliefs and concerns about artificial general intelligence, seek timely action in the coming months, and are attracted to AI-literate teams assembled to execute at scale.
What kinds of neurotech projects could AI philanthropy support?
21st century science enterprises: Today’s proliferation of neuroAI initiatives offers rich ground to explore strategic funding opportunities. Astera Institute has committed more than $1B over the next 10 years for research, fellowships, and investments. Patrick Mineault and the Amaranth Foundation recently published a thoughtful roundup with examples of data generation bets that systematically derisk clinical research, including Atlases and Digital Twins. “The Enigma project at Stanford, which is building the largest functional atlas ever collected,” writes Mineault, “was empowered by the creation of next-generation Neuropixels, increasing throughput by a factor of 4. A holistic AI strategy should optimize the creation of new tools vs. using existing tools to build atlases.”
Public health as market access: Patient registries, clinical trial recruitment, disease screening & prevention efforts, caregiving and aging in place programs, as well as health care deserts, end of life care, health literacy and patient education, and other areas are directly relevant to neurotech markets. Yet these domains operate on legacy infrastructure, disconnected from the innovation enterprise. If Science Corp can build an ecosystem to lower BCI R&D costs by 90%, why couldn’t an ambitious team conjure 21st century infrastructure layers that serve startups, researchers, drug companies, and patient communities?
Strategic philanthropy: Could a wave of new philanthropists flood the zone with smart neurotech bets across disability, brain disease, and other areas? The precedent for non-profit VC exists already. SCI Ventures has placed an array of early stage bets on both drugs and devices for spinal cord injury, including BCI from Precision, ONWARD, and Augmental, as well as recruiting a leading rehab hospital as a limited partner and ally. Thematic family office funds offer another example; before its untimely demise, Nexus invested $100 million+ within two years across autism, bipolar disorder, and Parkinson’s disease. Foundations are writing direct grants for translational research in mental health, brain cancer, and other areas. And Protocol Labs has set the bar on field-building that blends investment strategies to suit different opportunities.
In a more recent essay, Tom Kalil, CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy and an architect of the BRAIN Initiative, calls for agenda setting that includes “(a) the identification of an ambitious but achievable goal; (b) the specific actions that would need to be taken to achieve the goal; and (c) the rationale for philanthropic involvement.”
So, let’s hear it: What are your neurotech moonshot ideas that would advance public interests?
In Focus: Accelerating Science
In neurotech and other translational fields, the focused research organization (FRO) has emerged as a power model for impact investment. Typically, FROs launch with $50-100 million in funding with the charter to pursue specific milestones on a 5-7 year timeline. Convergent Research, a non-profit started in 2021 that has invested $400 million into a dozen FROs, calls them “a time-bound, technically ambitious effort designed to produce high-impact public goods that unblock scientific progress.”
Todd Huffman and Andrew Payne co-founded E11 Bio in 2021 as one of the first FROs, with the mission of building a new toolkit to advance whole brain mapping, or connectomics, using the mouse brain. Asimov Press’s deep dive explores E11’s work to derisk the substantial financial and technical barriers in this field. Two key technical innovations E11 Bio is advancing as an FRO include expansion microscopy to make tissue samples larger and easier to analyze with existing tools, and a novel system of assigning neuron-level “bar codes” with protein tagging that allows for accurate mapping through fluorescence microscopy.
Last year E11 started publishing their datasets and open-sourcing tools in line with their mission to facilitate progress by other researchers, labs, companies, and investors. Their work to advance the field of connectomics offers an example of a needle-moving idea that is too ambitious for academia, but ill-suited to a for-profit startup on a 5–7-year timeline. Watch Payne’s conversation with Ashlee Vance to learn more about E11’s work.
Forest Neurotech is another example of what’s possible through the FRO model. The organization was founded in 2023 by Sumner Norman, Tyson Aflalo, and Will Biederman to build new tools for whole-brain imaging using focused ultrasound. Forest offers an example of what is possible with targeted philanthropy. After launch, Forest licensed technology from Butterfly Network, secured additional funds from Convergent Research, and won an ARIA grant for clinical testing in the UK in 2025. Less than three years to human stage implants is an unprecedented pace in medical devices. See Jacques Carolan’s interview with Juan Benet below for a brief update on Forest’s progress in human subjects.
In the background Forest’s team was instrumentally involved in founding Merge Labs, which officially launched this year with $252 million in funding at a $850 million valuation. As Convergent’s team wrote following Merge’s launch: “Merge Labs’ new team and initial technical direction have roots in Forest Neurotech, a Focused Research Organization (FRO). Forest and Merge will continue to partner, carrying forward the transformative vision we shared when we started Forest just a few years ago. We are thrilled by the pace with which Forest was able to prove the efficacy of the FRO model, and that this proof has spurred deep tech investment at the scale required to take it to the next level.”
A new report from the White House, “Science: A New Golden Age,” points to FROs as a model to braid public and private interests to advance public interest technology. To what end? The report repeatedly points to “one of neuroscience’s grand challenges,” brain mapping: “Mapping the wiring of the mammalian brain, for example, requires not a student on a three-year cycle, but a sustained engineering team with the flexibility to scale quickly and hire from industry. It necessitates industrial-scale data collection and analysis, which is infeasible under the fragmented structure of traditional academic grants. It produces a public good whose benefits a single biotechnology company cannot fully internalize.”
A Human Connectome: A Decade Away?
In a recent preprint, Moritz Helmstaedter proposes a roadmap for obtaining a complete human connectome at synaptic resolution within the next decade. Helmstaedter, director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, argues that data storage and computing capabilities are not the primary bottlenecks to a human connectome, instead pointing to “two paramount prerequisites for progress: a broad and substantiated ethical discussion, and resource investments at the scale of $10 - 20 billion.”
The ethical discussion centers on sourcing quality human brain tissue for research and analysis. Helmstaedter calls for “a broad and substantiated consensus — across institutional ethics boards and the biomedical ethics scholarship” to discuss post-mortem brain donation and rapid autopsy protocols as technical requirements. In a recent essay in Daedalus, Viren Jain from Google and Jeff Lichtman from Harvard expound on these ethical challenges with a brief discussion of privacy, ownership, misinterpretation, and unintended use.
From here Helmstaedter’s paper outlines a path to rapid chemical fixation of a donated brain (via immersion and possibly vascular perfusion) which is then divided into roughly 50,000 blocks of about 3–5 mm, to preserve continuity of neuronal processes. With each block stained and sliced, they could be imaged with thousands of multibeam scanning electron microscopes operating in parallel over 5–10 years. These slices could be reconstructed through AI-driven processes that obviate the need for large-scale storage by deleting imaging data promptly after analysis and keeping only a compressed connectivity graph, of “a few dozen petabytes” capturing neuron IDs, synapse strengths, and physical locations.
After a first human sample is obtained and the technical pipeline is established, a similar process could run in parallel to systematically analyze smaller human brain samples from neurosurgical cases worldwide. Such an approach, if feasible, could help surface insights into building better AI, while uncovering clues or discoveries about the structural signatures of psychiatric and neurological disorders along the way.
Read the paper: “How to obtain a complete human connectome at synaptic
resolution within the next decade.”
Jacques Carolan on Frontier Innovation
Episode 3 of Juan Benet’s new podcast features Dr. Jacques Carolan, a founding Program Director at ARIA, whom we’ve interviewed here before. The dialogue fits in perfectly with this issue’s themes of financing strategies for big bets across neuro. Check out the table of contents and dive in.
As usual the conversation is wide-ranging, loaded with examples across history, geography, and disciplines. Some highlights: Carolan speaks briefly about the three (!) biohybrid neural interface projects underway in ARIA’s portfolio, advances to remove sEEG from DBS, ultrasound-targeted gene therapies for disorders of excitation, and a project exploring the acousto-electric effect for non-invasive whole-brain interfacing: “If you put an acoustic field into the brain, you focus down to 1 MHz and you then apply an electric field at 1 MHz + 10 hz. You’ll actually get a beat frequency in the middle, an electrical drive frequency of 10 hz, the difference…Can we figure out what the scattering matrix of the brain is, then apply the inverse of that with some kind of helmet system?”
Beyond technologies and interfaces, the conversation offers a sweeping overview of what neurotech ecosystems can look like when they’re purpose-built to unleash human innovation. How can funders distill the right kinds of technical uncertainty to de-risk? Should we prioritize existing therapeutic pathways or new target discovery? How can “activation partners” from hardware to wetware suppliers unlock efficiencies for early stage startups? Where does advocacy and storytelling fit into technical R&D? How can we cultivate innovation cultures that allow for serendipity without compromising accountability? How can government programs like ARIA or ARPA-H catalyze public engagement and advance the field beyond grant funding?
For funders, founders, techno-philanthropists, and dreamers, the opportunities have never been more accessible.
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