By Hamza Faisal

OpenAI's venture arm is putting money into brain implants — but not the kind that move cursors. The OpenAI Startup Fund and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund have co-led a $45 million round for Coherence Neuro, a San Francisco startup building a brain implant designed to detect and potentially treat cancer.

The round, announced October 21 and first reported by WIRED, lands amid a surge of AI money flowing into brain-computer interfaces. But Coherence is chasing a goal no BCI company has attempted: using AI to read the faint electrical signals of brain tumors, then fighting them with targeted electrical stimulation.

A button-sized implant with a cancer mission

Coherence's platform, called SOMA, pairs a button-sized wireless implant with a coin-sized removable over-ear wearable and a smartphone app. The implant records electrical activity around a brain tumor; the company's AI models claim to pick up tumor-linked signals in animal tests and distinguish whether a cancer is growing, shrinking, or recurring.

The lead target is glioblastoma, one of the most aggressive and terminal brain cancers. The implant can also deliver mild electrical pulses intended to slow tumor growth — with the long-term vision of a device that learns each patient's cancer signals and responds in real time.

Three patients, thirty minutes

Human testing is at the earliest stage. This summer, Coherence briefly tested the implant's recording ability in three patients undergoing brain-tumor removal surgery at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia — the device stayed in place for about 30 minutes as a safety check before removal. The company is now testing both recording and stimulation in seven more patients.

The new funding is meant to pay for a longer-term clinical trial with implants left in glioblastoma patients, and Coherence is seeking FDA breakthrough device designation. Its research pipeline also extends toward pancreatic cancer and other tumors elsewhere in the body.

Founded in 2022 by neuroengineering researchers Ben Woodington and Elise Jenkins at the University of Cambridge, the company had previously raised a reported $10 million seed round. The new round also drew Lux Capital, 8VC, Timeless, SV Angel, Ahren Innovation Capital, and Olive Capital, with earlier backers doubling down.

OpenAI keeps its hands off the brain data

Woodington told WIRED there is "growing synergy" between major AI labs and brain-interface firms: the devices generate datasets too large for humans to analyze, a natural workload for AI models. But he drew a sharp contractual line — OpenAI will have no access to the brain data SOMA generates.

That boundary distinguishes the deal from Merge Labs, the brain-computer-interface startup cofounded by OpenAI chief Sam Altman, which launched in January with $252 million and an explicit plan to collaborate with OpenAI on shared foundation models. Neuralink has raised $650 million and Precision Neuroscience closed a $250 million round — yet Coherence's oncology bet is by far the riskiest hypothesis of the bunch.

By Hamza Faisal