Beyond the Neuralink narrative
While Elon Musk’s Neuralink often dominates headlines around brain-computer interfaces, China’s BCI sector is advancing at a steady and increasingly commercial pace. What was once limited to research labs is transitioning into clinical deployment, policy-backed scaling, and structured capital formation.
Entrepreneurs such as Phoenix Peng, co-founder of implant-focused NeuroXess and founder of noninvasive ultrasound BCI startup Gestala, argue that the industry is entering a pivotal phase. In several provinces, including Sichuan, Hubei, and Zhejiang, authorities have already introduced medical service pricing frameworks for BCI procedures, accelerating integration into China’s national health insurance system.
Policy alignment and industrial coordination
In August 2025, China’s industry ministry, together with six other agencies, released a national roadmap outlining milestones for BCI development through 2030. The plan targets technical breakthroughs by 2027, standardized industry norms, and a fully integrated supply chain within five years.
Support extends beyond planning documents. In late 2025, an 11.6 billion yuan brain science fund was announced at the Shenzhen BCI & Human-Computer Interaction Expo to assist companies from research through commercialization. The centralized alignment between reimbursement policy, technical standards, and clinical deployment offers a structural advantage in scaling medical technologies.
Clinical scale and manufacturing strength
Industry participants cite four principal drivers behind China’s rapid progress: strong state coordination, access to large patient populations for trials, mature manufacturing capacity, and sustained capital inflows.
China has completed its first fully implanted, wireless BCI clinical trial, allowing a paralyzed patient to control devices without external hardware. More than 50 flexible implantable BCI trials had been completed by mid-2025, spanning motor decoding, language processing, spinal cord reconstruction, and stroke rehabilitation.
Manufacturing depth across semiconductors, AI systems, and medical hardware supports faster prototyping and cost efficiency. Meanwhile, companies such as StairMed Technology and BrainCo have secured major funding rounds, and firms including NeuroXess, Neuracle, NeuralMatrix, and Zhiran Medical are actively expanding product pipelines.
Market forecasts estimate China’s BCI sector could surpass 3.8 billion yuan in 2025 and grow beyond 120 billion yuan by 2040.
Invasive versus noninvasive pathways
The field is bifurcating into two dominant approaches. Invasive systems, including those developed by Neuralink and NeuroXess, implant electrodes directly in the brain, enabling high-resolution neural signal capture but carrying surgical risk.
Noninvasive alternatives such as EEG-based headsets trade precision for safety and accessibility. Emerging modalities, including ultrasound-based BCIs like Gestala’s and approaches backed internationally by companies such as Merge Labs, aim to influence neural activity without implantation.
Ultrasound systems are targeting high-prevalence conditions such as chronic pain, stroke recovery, and depression. According to Peng, early trials of Gestala’s platform suggest a single session may reduce pain scores significantly for one to two weeks, positioning noninvasive BCIs as more commercially scalable and socially acceptable solutions.
Regulation, data sovereignty, and ethics
Looking ahead, China’s regulatory framework for BCIs is expected to align more closely with global standards referencing organizations such as IEC, ISO, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Authorities are likely to increase oversight for invasive implants and strengthen governance around neural data.
Ethical considerations are also moving forward. Policymakers plan to expand informed consent requirements, extend ethics review beyond traditional medical boundaries, and implement unified technical standards for clinical evaluation.
For now, healthcare remains the primary commercial battlefield. Longer term, advocates envision applications expanding from therapeutic intervention to cognitive augmentation, positioning BCIs as a potential interface between human neural systems and artificial intelligence. Whether that vision materializes at scale will depend less on rhetoric and more on regulatory clarity, reimbursement pathways, and sustained technical breakthroughs.