Building Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs)

We are building the most advanced brain-computer interface (BCI) platform, designed to recapture and extend human capabilities. Our first product, the Connexus® BCI, is engineered to restore speech and computer control for people with loss of motor function. This is just the beginning of what Paradromics’ technology can do to reclaim autonomy and connection for those in need. 

The Paradromics Ethos: Who We Are

Our mission is built on decades of BCI research and experience, providing us with unique insight into how to most successfully design this life-changing technology. Our team and research collaborators include scientists, engineers, and clinicians who have been on the forefront of this academic pursuit that is now transforming into a rapidly growing industry. The deliberate decision to build our company on a foundation of scientific, engineering, and clinical rigor has drawn such talent to our mission, enabling Paradromics to bridge the gap between bench and bedside. 

What Matters to BCI Users

Since BCIs are cutting-edge technology being commercially evaluated in real time, it is still hotly contested which system or strategy will be superior for patients. Regardless of presumed shortcomings of any BCI modality, the successful expansion and adoption of BCI technology must be guided by what matters for patients. 

This is embodied in the three pillars which direct our work at Paradromics: Safety, Performance, and Durability. 

There should be benchmarks for safety, performance, and durability by which all BCI systems can be measured. Evaluating the three pillars’ performance is necessary in order to compare objectively across BCI systems and to assess each system’s overall utility. 

When comparing BCI systems, there are discussions about tradeoffs between the three pillars. One system may be represented as “safer” but have objectively limited performance capability; one may be engineered to be more durable but have higher safety concerns; and one may enable high functional restoration but needs to be replaced often. 

At Paradromics, we believe the three pillars should define minimum thresholds that must be crossed to deliver widespread clinically and personally meaningful success for those who use the technology. Thus, we have designed a BCI platform to maximize safety and performance and durability.

The Three Pillars of Paradromics: Foundations for BCIs

Safety 

Overall clinical safety is the prime foundation upon which performance and durability are built. We set a threshold to engineer a system which is as safe as current commonly implanted medical devices.

To evaluate the safety of the Connexus BCI in this context, we examined established, FDA-approved brain implants routinely used by neurosurgeons, such as stereoelectroencephalography (sEEG) and deep brain stimulation (DBS) systems, which involve placing up to 20 probes deep into the brain. While these probes are vastly larger and placed deeper than any intracortical BCI, both sEEG and DBS devices have been safely used for decades in tens of thousands of patients (Sarica et al., 2023; Muthiah et al., 2025; Rasiah et al., 2023). 

Most clinical BCI work has used the Utah array, an early, research-grade intracortical BCI with an excellent safety profile demonstrated over the course of 12,203 days of safety experience (Rubin et al., 2023). 

Connexus BCI has progressed beyond earlier design limitations. Our device is completely housed within the body, eliminating any percutaneous infection risks associated with skin-penetrating connectors. Additionally, the Connexus BCI components are modeled after cardiac pacemakers and DBS stimulator designs, which are safely implanted in tens of thousands of patients annually.

We also designed our device to be implanted using standard neurosurgical techniques that can be performed without specialized surgical equipment or training. This not only allows for efficient and universal implantation of our device but also intentionally reduces surgeon-related procedural risks. 

We have implemented rigorous preclinical testing and shown safe implantation and removal in a human patient. We designed our device with a focus on the clinical safety for the entire lifetime of the Connexus BCI system — from implantation and utilization all the way through explantation — in order to meet our threshold for clinical safety comparable to widely implanted medical devices. 

Performance

After clinical safety, BCI systems must also deliver meaningful restoration of function and autonomy to patients. For example:

• Can they efficiently type an email?
• Can they control a robotic arm to navigate their home?
• Can they naturally communicate with colleagues and loved ones? 

If a BCI’s performance does not exceed currently available assistive devices or restore function to a level acceptable by the user, then it does not meet the performance threshold for commercial clinical deployment. 

Our experience tells us that BCI performance is directly related to the quality and fidelity of the signals at the scale of individual neurons. The power of intracortical BCIs, such as our Connexus BCI, comes from capturing high-fidelity signals at the scale of individual neurons. Individual neurons carry detailed, specific information that differs from even their immediate neighbors (Smith and Fetz 2009). Intracortical BCIs have demonstrated the greatest potential for meaningful clinical benefit and functional restoration in multiple clinical studies (Yang et al., 2026). 

It is possible to quantify the potential performance of a BCI system and use that to assess its potential for specific clinical applications. For instance, just the linguistic information content of natural human speech (i.e., the transcript of speech) has been estimated to be approximately 40 bps (Coupé et al., 2019), meaning that high BCI data rate is a prerequisite for complex applications. 

As a means to quantitatively compare the performance potential of different BCIs, the field should use a standardized method for measuring the information transfer rate of a BCI system to define “high performance”. We developed the SONIC (Standard for Optimizing Neural Interface Capacity) benchmark to standardize the data rate of any BCI system in bits per second (bps) (Perkins et al., 2025). 

We demonstrated that the Connexus BCI achieves a record-setting information transfer rate of over 200 bps, quantitatively establishing the potential to deliver capabilities such as speech and complex motor restoration that exceeds our threshold for performance. 

Durability

Finally, any BCI should meet the final threshold of being a long-term solution for the user — it should last for years without a need for replacement, comparable to established medical implants. 

To date, the majority of BCI devices have been implanted intentionally for short-term scientific study. From these, there have been insights into the durability of implants and the potential to support long-term performance. The Utah array, an extensively studied, first-generation BCI, has been noted to trigger biological responses that could degrade signal quality or even physically displace the sensors over time (Kozai et al., 2015). Few of the early BCI systems appear to have been engineered to be durable biologically or computationally from the start. 

In contrast, the Connexus BCI has been designed to address these challenges, drawing from decades of scientific and engineering experience in established implantable medical devices. 

Our intracortical array is made of solid platinum-iridium electrodes, a material with a proven history of optimally operating within the body for decades. We also employ watertight, hermetic packaging techniques – similar to those used in spacecraft – ensuring the complex microelectronics are completely sealed and shielded from the body’s environment for many years and establishing reliability in a tiny device with thousands of electrical connections.

Preclinical studies of the Connexus BCI have demonstrated incredibly stable, high-quality neural recordings for more than three years — and recordings are still ongoing. We have observed no implant migration and have successfully continued to decode neural signals from the brain with nearly no loss of signal fidelity. This ongoing physical and functional durability gives us confidence that the Connexus BCI system will last for years while still providing high-level performance, meeting our threshold for durability.

Realizing the Promises of Tomorrow

Successful clinical implementation and adoption of BCIs will not be built on abstract metrics, thought experiments, or marketing claims. Ultimately, the true measure of our progress is from the individuals who will benefit from our device and the criteria that actually matter to patients: safety, performance, and durability.

As the BCI field rapidly evolves, Paradromics is leading the way by refusing to view   these pillars as tradeoffs. Instead, we consider them as minimal standards every BCI technology must meet before it reaches a patient.

For us, these three pillars support one mission: restoring function for people in need. Because the ultimate measure of innovation isn’t what device we build, but what capabilities our technology unlocks for the people who need it most.

About the Authors

Dr. Vikash Gilja, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of Paradromics and joined from a tenured professorship at the University of California San Diego, building on his foundational work on BCI neural decoding; Dr. Gilja also brings unique perspective as a founding member of the Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory at Stanford University, a pivotal center for BCI research, and as an early member of the Neuralink team. Dr. Stephen Ryu, MD is the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of Paradromics and joined as an internationally recognized neurosurgeon and researcher who has published extensively on the use of BCIs for prosthetic movement and established novel surgical techniques used by prominent companies today. He was also a founding member of the Neural Prosthetics Systems Laboratory at Stanford University.

*Caution: Connexus BCI is an investigational device limited by United States law to investigational use.