The trouble began before the electrodes reached a brain. Precision Neuroscience needed a manufacturer capable of making its delicate cortical arrays. In a 2024 interview, chief executive Michael Mager described one supplier’s results: more than $2 million spent, eighteen months elapsed, six arrays produced. Only about 55 percent of their electrodes worked on average. A company hoping to translate brain signals into computer commands had encountered a rather terrestrial problem. It could not get enough of the thing it needed to test.
- Layer 7 rests on the cortex without piercing brain tissue.
- The temporary array is FDA-cleared; the permanent wireless BCI remains investigational.
- Precision bought a foundry to control fabrication and iteration.
- A Medtronic partnership puts surgical workflow at the center of its commercial plans.
Precision subsequently acquired a Texas foundry. That decision is a useful entrance to the company’s story because brain interfaces are often discussed as feats of imagination. Here, progress also depended on production equipment, quality control and someone delivering the goods. The future had a supply-chain department.
A sheet, rather than a needle
Founded in 2021, Precision builds interfaces between electrical activity in the brain and digital systems. Its co-founders include neurosurgeon and engineer Benjamin Rapoport, chief executive Michael Mager, microfabrication specialist Mark Hettick and Demetrios Papageorgiou. Their central design choice is visible in the hardware: a flexible sheet that conforms to the cortex, the brain’s outer surface, without inserting its electrodes into the tissue.
Rapoport previously co-founded Neuralink. Harvard Medicine’s account describes his concern about a trade-off in penetrating interfaces: adding electrodes could mean adding tissue injury. Evidence that useful signals could be captured at the surface encouraged another approach. Precision’s proposition is to increase the density and coverage of surface recordings while designing the array to be removable.
Layer 7 contains 1,024 electrodes in a film thinner than a human hair. Multiple arrays can cover more territory. In April 2024, a Mount Sinai team recorded from four arrays, totaling 4,096 electrodes. More sampling points offer a finer view of electrical activity. Electrode count alone, however, cannot tell you whether someone will reliably compose a message or operate a device.
Electrical activity
Signal recording
Learned patterns
Digital command
Recording a signal and interpreting its meaning are separate engineering tasks.
The operating room is the first proving ground
The immediate users are clinicians and researchers. Precision has evaluated arrays during surgeries patients were already having for other conditions. That setting lets researchers examine signals while clinical teams continue the planned operation. The company’s longer-term intended users include people whose paralysis prevents them from using conventional computer controls.
A paper published online in Nature Biomedical Engineering in October 2025 described a five-patient intraoperative pilot, alongside animal and cadaver work. It demonstrated the feasibility of high-density surface recordings and explored decoding and stimulation. The minimally invasive delivery experiments avoiding craniotomy were conducted in pigs and cadavers. Those distinctions matter: a promising surgical technique in a model is a different achievement from a permanent implant working at home.
The FDA’s March 30, 2025 clearance is similarly specific. Layer 7-T is a single-use cortical electrode device for temporary use of less than thirty days with recording, monitoring and stimulation equipment. It is wired, has no software of its own and is not MRI-compatible. Clearance gives Precision a defined clinical product; it does not authorize the company’s proposed permanent wireless assistive system.
The customer already has a map
Consider a surgeon working near tissue involved in speech or movement. Structural navigation helps establish where the surgeon is. Electrical recordings provide another kind of information: what nearby tissue is doing. In January 2026, Precision and Medtronic announced plans to combine Layer 7 with Medtronic’s StealthStation navigation platform, bringing functional and structural information into an integrated solution.
The commercial attraction is practical. A new device becomes easier to consider when it works with equipment a clinical team already uses. The proposed integration is still a development project. But it explains why Precision belongs in the medical-device market as well as the BCI race: temporary cortical mapping can have a clinical purpose before a permanent communication implant reaches patients.
Its business model begins with institutional medical-device customers and single-use arrays. The permanent system would require a further clinical and regulatory path. Neuralink and Paradromics pursue penetrating designs; Synchron approaches the brain through blood vessels. For temporary mapping, established cortical electrodes are also relevant alternatives. Each route makes different bargains about access, signal collection and surgery. A competition table based only on electrode totals would miss the actual buying decision.
A semiconductor problem wearing a surgical gown
Precision’s manufacturing subsidiary, Precision BioMEMS, operates a 22,000-square-foot facility in Addison, Texas. Its 2023 acquisition included cleanroom capacity and an experienced team. Ownership gives Precision control over fabrication, quality management and changes to the array. For a company still learning which design works best, a shorter production loop is part of the research apparatus.
Buying a foundry is an expensive answer to a supplier problem, and the acquisition price was not disclosed. The broader financing bill is visible. Precision raised $41 million in its 2023 Series B and $102 million in its 2024 Series C. A $250 million Series D announced in September 2026 brought company-reported total capital raised to $430 million. That money supports clinical expansion, regulatory work and commercialization infrastructure. It is financing, rather than evidence of therapeutic success.
The ambition is an ordinary conversation
Precision’s website offers a useful correction to the usual brain-interface spectacle. Desiree Pascale, who lives with ALS, says: “I want to talk about boy drama with my daughter.” The desired output is wonderfully ordinary. Communication technology earns its place by making room for jokes, disagreements and the small conversations that families actually have.
“I want to talk about boy drama with my daughter.”Desiree Pascale, featured by Precision
The company’s community advisory board includes people with neurological disabilities and caregivers. Its stated culture emphasizes safety and human impact. Those commitments will be tested by usability as much as laboratory performance. A surface electrode still requires surgery; short-term recording cannot establish years of dependable operation. Appropriate brain access, interpretable signals and clinical support remain necessary.
Other builders can copy the sequence: identify the process slowing experimentation, control it where justified, and find a useful clinical job for the first product. They cannot assume the same economics in a field without specialist manufacturing or a suitable temporary-use pathway. Precision’s wager is that a better view of the brain can become useful medicine in stages. The eventual measure will be what patients can do with it.