Precision Neuroscience Builds a Scalable Brain Interface

Precision Neuroscience is building a brain-computer interface around a simple but demanding idea: capture high-resolution neural signals without piercing brain tissue. Its Layer 7 Cortical Interface rests on the brain's surface, using 1,024 electrodes per module to record and stimulate electrical activity.

The New York company was founded in 2021 by CEO Michael Mager, neurosurgeon and Chief Science Officer Benjamin Rapoport, and engineering co-founder Mark Hettick. Precision's first intended application is helping people with paralysis control computers, phones, and other digital devices through thought.

Precision matters now because its work has moved beyond the device-demo phase. The company has an FDA-cleared cortical electrode, a growing clinical network, peer-reviewed research, in-house MEMS manufacturing, hospital-technology partnerships, and $430M in company-reported capital after a $250M Series D. The larger test is whether those assets can become a safe, repeatable medical system.

About Precision Neuroscience and Layer 7

Layer 7 is a thin, flexible array designed to conform to the surface of the brain. Precision says it can be inserted under the scalp through a micro-slit and removed or replaced without the array penetrating brain tissue. Each postage-stamp-sized module carries 1,024 electrodes, and early work has placed four modules for more than 4,000 recording channels.

That architecture separates Precision from systems built around penetrating electrode threads or arrays. Surface placement may offer a different tradeoff among surgical access, signal density, coverage, removal, and repeat use. It does not eliminate clinical risk, and it does not make every technical challenge easy. The company still has to connect high-resolution signals to reliable software, implanted electronics, wireless communication, surgical procedures, and years of evidence.

The regulatory distinction is equally important. FDA record K242618 covers the Layer 7-T cortical electrode for recording, monitoring, and stimulation of electrical activity on the brain's surface. Precision says the clearance supports use for up to 30 days. The complete fully implantable wireless BCI remains in development and is not available for sale in the United States.

Why Precision Neuroscience matters right now

Brain-computer interfaces have no shortage of dramatic demonstrations. The hard work begins after the cursor moves: surgeons need a workable procedure, regulators need bounded evidence, hospitals need training and support, manufacturers need repeatable quality, and patients need outcomes that survive outside a controlled research environment.

Precision is assembling those pieces in parallel. Its September 2026 financing announcement reports more than 100 procedures across 18 medical institutions, including work with academic medical centers such as Mount Sinai, Penn Medicine, UChicago Medicine, and West Virginia University's Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute. Peer-reviewed research in Nature Biomedical Engineering describes minimally invasive delivery and early human use of the high-density surface array.

Those milestones do not establish permanent-implant efficacy, but they give Precision an operating asset many hardware companies lack: repeated access to varied clinical settings. Every site produces more than data. It exposes differences in surgical workflow, protocol design, patient needs, staff training, follow-up, and how neural information fits into existing care.

Manufacturing and hospital integration are the strategy

Precision owns a 22,000-square-foot MEMS fabrication facility in Addison, Texas. The facility includes a 5,500-square-foot ISO Class 5 clean room and gives the company direct control over the microfabrication process behind its electrode arrays.

Vertical integration creates cost and execution risk, but it can shorten the loop between a clinical observation, an engineering change, and a manufacturable revision. In neurotechnology, where hardware touches brain tissue and product iterations move through quality systems, owning that loop can be more strategic than outsourcing a fragile process too early.

The company's work with Medtronic points toward the other half of adoption. Precision and Medtronic are developing an integration between Layer 7 and the StealthStation surgical-navigation platform. The goal is to place functional neural information inside a tool neurosurgical teams already understand, rather than forcing hospitals to assemble an entirely new workflow around an unfamiliar interface.

Leadership spans medicine, hardware, data, and commercialization

Precision's founding team reflects the product's cross-disciplinary burden. Michael Mager brings company-building experience, while Benjamin Rapoport combines neurosurgery with electrical engineering and previously co-founded Neuralink. Mark Hettick leads engineering work as a co-founder and VP of Engineering.

The current leadership bench extends across AI and neural data, clinical strategy, finance, people operations, device engineering, manufacturing, legal affairs, and commercialization. Craig Mermel, formerly at Google and Apple, is Chief AI and Data Officer. Nate Pletcher, with prior hardware leadership at Google, Verily, and X, is CTO. Vanessa Tolosa leads R&D operations after work at Meta Reality Labs and Neuralink, and former Axonics operator John Woock leads business strategy as Chief Business Officer.

This mix matters because a BCI company cannot choose between being a science organization, a medical-device manufacturer, a software company, and a hospital operator. It has to become competent at all four, then prove that the pieces work as one system.

Culture and hiring are an execution signal

Precision's careers page frames its culture around human impact, safety, urgency, listening, and setting clinical and technical standards. It also highlights an interdisciplinary team and points candidates to current openings, though the public page fetched for this review did not expose a reliable vacancy count.

The hiring signal is more useful than a list of roles. Precision has added leaders across clinical adoption, manufacturing, medical affairs, AI, finance, commercial operations, and people systems while expanding its research network. That pattern suggests the company is preparing for coordination at scale, not simply adding engineers to improve an isolated prototype.

Precision also maintains a community advisory board that includes people living with ALS, spinal-cord injury, and stroke, as well as caregivers and advocates. Lived experience cannot replace formal clinical evidence, but it can force product decisions back toward practical questions: how a device is delivered, what independence means to a user, and which tradeoffs patients will accept.

What Precision Neuroscience must prove next

The company's oversubscribed $250M Series D funds clinical expansion, additional FDA review, and commercialization infrastructure. It gives Precision room to advance evidence, manufacturing, software, and hospital readiness without treating any single milestone as the finish line.

The next proof points are specific: additional regulatory decisions for the permanent system, reliable functional outcomes for intended users, longer-duration evidence, repeatable manufacturing quality, and hospital deployments that do not behave like bespoke research projects. Precision has built a high-density window onto the brain. Its real company-building challenge is everything required to make that window useful, trusted, and scalable.