Sam Altman's Brain-Chip Company Merge Labs to Take Direct Aim at Elon Musk's Neuralink

Sam Altman is launching Merge Labs, a brain-computer-interface venture designed to go head-to-head with Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Reported by the Financial Times, the startup carries an estimated valuation of $850 million and is in discussions to raise another $250 million, likely from OpenAI’s venture arm.

Altman co-founded Merge Labs with Alex Blania, known for leading World (Worldcoin), the eye-scanning digital identity project also backed by Altman.

Despite his role in founding the company, Altman will not oversee operations on a daily basis.

Merge Labs will focus on high-bandwidth, scalable brain-machine interfaces that are less invasive than Neuralink’s current approach.

The ambition extends beyond medical applications, seeking broader deployment across consumer and enterprise domains.

Neuralink remains the current lead in the field. It’s already conducting human trials and is backed by a valuation of roughly $9 billion following a $650 million fundraising round this year.

Neuralink also demonstrated real-world progress by enabling a patient to control a cursor via thought in 2024.

Altman’s interest in human-machine integration isn’t new. In a 2017 blog post, he forecast that the “merge” of humans and AI could arrive by 2025 and that it’s going to become “a lot weirder”.

Yes, the startup is all about to “merge humans and machines together through artificial intelligence.”

Naming the startup Merge Labs appears to echo that early vision.

The rivalry between Altman and Musk has deepened. Both co-founded OpenAI, but Musk left the board in 2018 amid philosophical differences.

Since then, he launched the AI startup xAI and publicly challenged OpenAI’s for-profit structure.

The BCI space is drawing multiple players. Beyond Neuralink and Merge Labs, startups like Precision Neuroscience and Synchron are also advancing their own interfaces.

This intensifying competition amplifies the stakes and raises ethical questions about human-technology integration.

The venture represents a significant strategic shift. Altman is broadening his influence from AI into the fundamental domain of cognition itself.

How Merge Labs executes and how regulators, markets, and the public respond will define whether this initiative sets a new trajectory in neurotechnology or remains another ambitious idea on paper.