Chinese startup building implantable brain-computer interface chips and Mandarin neural decoding technology for aphasia patients.
Neuralicorn (西湖灵犀科技, also referred to as Westlake Lingxi) is a Chinese brain-computer interface company incubated at Westlake University and founded in 2022 in Hangzhou by CEO Cao Lu, with chief scientist Mohamad Sawan and co-founder Yang Jie. The company develops fully implantable BCI systems that place high-density electrodes over the brain's language motor region, pairing a self-developed neural signal acquisition chip with low-latency decoding algorithms to convert speech-related neural activity into text or synthesized speech for patients with aphasia and other speech disorders.
Its core hardware is a 256-channel high-throughput neural interface chip fabricated on a 40nm process, with a 1024-channel architecture demonstrated for future higher-density signal acquisition. On the software side, the company has built a full-spectrum Mandarin Chinese neural decoding framework covering all 407 Mandarin syllables, reporting sentence-level character accuracy above 70%, single-character top-3 recognition above 90%, and inference latency under 20 milliseconds.
Neuralicorn raised an angel-plus round of tens of millions of RMB in June 2026 led by Yida Capital, with participation from Heyu Capital, Qizhen Fund and Nanjing Innovation Investment Group, to fund further chip development and clinical translation. In November 2026 it secured a strategic investment from Danyang Huichuang Medical Equipment (a domestic brain-imaging and optical BCI company) aimed at building next-generation BCI infrastructure around neuromorphic chips.