The startup, founded just two months before its raise, has secured China’s largest early-stage brain-computer interface round, heavily oversubscribed.
Phoenix Peng has already built one brain-computer interface company. NeuroXess, his first venture, develops implantable BCI systems designed to restore communication and motor function for people with severe neurological conditions.
His second company, Gestala, takes a different approach: no surgery, no implants, and a technology that Peng believes could define the next generation of the field entirely.
Gestala has raised $21.6 million, approximately CN¥150 million, just two months after its founding, at a valuation that Peng told TechCrunch sits between $100 million and $200 million.
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The round was co-led by Guosheng Capital and Dalton Venture, with Tsing Song Capital, Gobi Ventures, Fourier Intelligence, Liepin, and Seas Capital also participating. Investor demand significantly exceeded available allocation: commitments ultimately totalled more than $58 million, making the round more than 2.5 times oversubscribed.
The company is developing non-invasive brain-computer interface technology based on focused ultrasound, a modality that Peng argues addresses one of the most persistent barriers to BCI adoption at scale: the requirement for brain surgery.
Unlike electrode-based implants, ultrasound can penetrate the skull and access deep neural circuits without any incision. Using phased-array ultrasound, the system can both monitor and precisely stimulate or suppress specific regions of neural activity.
The company claims its technology can reach deep neural circuits that implanted surface arrays cannot, and that it can modulate activity across larger brain regions simultaneously, potentially enabling applications that current generation BCIs cannot support.
The lead clinical programme is chronic pain management. Existing academic research, Peng says, suggests ultrasound neuromodulation can significantly reduce pain levels, and chronic pain represents a large addressable population in both China and the United States.
Beyond pain, Gestala is studying applications in mental health, including depression, PTSD, autism spectrum disorder, and OCD, as well as stroke rehabilitation. Longer-term targets include Alzheimer’s disease, essential tremor, and Parkinson’s disease.
In total, the company is researching six to eight potential indications, though Peng acknowledged that most remain at an early research stage rather than in active clinical trials.
Gestala is not the first ultrasound BCI company globally. Several US-based rivals have emerged in recent years, including Merge Labs, OpenAI-backed and among the better-funded in the space.
But Peng maintains that Gestala is the first in China, and he believes the country’s integrated manufacturing ecosystem and lower clinical trial costs give the company structural advantages in moving from prototype to production.
Clinical trials in China run at roughly 20 to 33 per cent of the cost of equivalent studies in the United States or Europe, Peng said. Gestala is already working with major Chinese hospitals to design and accelerate this research.
Alongside its clinical work, the company is building what it calls an ‘Ultrasound Brain Bank’, a large clinical dataset intended to train AI models to decode brain signals and eventually support neurological diagnostics.
Peng’s stated ambition does not stop at China. Despite rising geopolitical tensions between Beijing and Washington, he remains publicly open to US-China collaboration on deep-technology research, framing the two countries as complementary rather than purely competitive: China brings manufacturing integration and clinical research scale; the United States brings world-class scientific talent.
Whether the current political environment permits that vision to materialise is another question.
Yet, this round is the largest early-stage funding in China’s BCI industry, a claim consistent with the broader surge in global BCI investment that has placed the sector among the most closely watched in deep tech.
Neuralink, Musk’s implantable BCI company, raised $600 million at a $9 billion valuation in May 2025. Merge Labs, following OpenAI’s investment in January 2026, is also scaling its ultrasound programme.
Proceeds from the round will go toward research and development, scaling the team from its current 15 employees to approximately 35 by the end of the year, and establishing a manufacturing facility in China.
Gestala’s first-generation prototype is targeted for completion before the end of 2026.
