Cognixion's Non-Invasive Brain-Computer Interface | MedTech World North America 2026

Company Showcase, Cognixion, Andreas Forsland, CEO at Cognixion.

Good to see you guys today. Thank you. I came in from Santa Barbara, California. Hopefully you guys all had great trips in and are enjoying your time. I wanted to share today the work that we're doing at Cognixion. We're focused primarily on creating a neural interface that enables millions of people that are impacted by motor and speech disabilities to communicate again. This includes conditions such as stroke, ALS, Parkinson's, clinically locked-in syndrome, cerebral palsy, and many others. Many of these people, all of them in fact, have thoughts and voices that have gone quiet, and we want to unlock a chorus of new ideas. We sort of think about it in the sense of Stephen Hawking had access to incredible technology, and he made a huge impact in the world. Our thoughts are why can't millions of more people have the same kind of impact?

I want to step back a little bit because my background, prior to starting Cognixion, I worked at Philips, and I worked in the design and innovation group. And there we spent a lot of time looking over the horizon, working with teams of anthropologists looking at where trends were going to go over the coming decades. So, what I wanted to share with you is just a general pattern as an arc of where human-computer interaction is, how or has been, is, and is going. If you think back, the original computer was really dependent on physical input. If you think about moving ahead into the mobile world, it very much was about gesture recognition, where the machine reads your body. Where we are now is the machine is now reading your mind. Many of you may be familiar with or have read headlines around breakthroughs in the world of brain computer interface, this is the world that Cognixion is operating in. And it's really accelerating because of the convergence of several technologies, one of which is advanced computing, edge computing, as well as AI.

If you look back in the world of medtech, there's been a tremendous amount of innovation that's occurred, whether that's ranging from AI diagnostics that have aided in clinical decision-making, advances in robotic surgery, even going back to Computer Motion back in my hometown of Santa Barbara, wearables and continuous glucose monitors, and mRNA and genomics. We're doing some breakthrough things today because of advances in science and engineering that's occurred over the last couple of decades. But those are all based on physical medicine. The nervous system and the brain, according to NIH and NINDS, we currently have over 400 diagnosable conditions that are poorly measured and are primarily driven by qualitative bedside assessments. We think that the future, when you combine these trends of accessible sensors, AI technology, and mobile offline compute in wearables, it presents an opportunity to truly transform care delivery and reinventing neurology and all of the subspecialties of the brain and the peripheral nervous system.

Some of you may be familiar with the BCI field. AI has really been the unlock for brain computer interfacing, especially in the world of BCI for communication. Some of the logos you see here include on the surgical side include Neuralink, Synchron, Paradromics, and Merge Labs. What you might find, which is interesting, is that although these are medtech companies, they're positioned as tech med. It's very much about taking a technology approach and applying it to biological and human conditions. Cognixion is in a unique position where we're the leading non-invasive alternative to the surgical approaches for brain computer interface. And it's quite intuitive if you think about both the Hippocratic oath as well as general sentiment across the populations. Raise your hand if you had an option to either wear a wearable or an implant, which would you rather have? Raise your hand if you'd rather have a wearable. Right. There are going to be conditions that require an implant that wearables just can't support. But at Cognixion when we think about the human interface, we think about it in terms of degrees of freedom. So if any of you have kids that play video games, they think about PlayStation and like three DOF, six DOF degrees of freedom. When you're thinking about bionics such as articulating a prosthetic arm, you might be thinking about 27 degrees of freedom. So this is the distinction between where we think of the future of neurological implants for BCI will excel and Cognixion will be primarily focused on nine DOF and lower applications such as computer control, speech, wheelchair control, etc.

But what's interesting is when you look at those implantable companies, they're mainly sensors and there isn't really a broad use of those sensors beyond a specific vertical indication of use. So really the missing link here is software and the AI layer where Cognixion excels at creating the neural operating system with our own AR engine interfacing with XR interfaces and an app platform. I wanted to share here some data that hasn't yet been seen. We're going to be publishing this in June. We've done two clinical trials with our wearable BCI and it's now able to help ALS patients that have no other means of communicating to communicate upwards of 44 words per minute, which is faster than thumb texting. If you see the chart on the right, that represents continuous ongoing dialogue back and forth turn taking of conversations with both letter spelling, word selection, as well as full phrase prediction and editing. These are very dynamic conversations that we're able to generate non-surgically that could be used in the home or in a critical care environment, going way beyond just simple yes no communication. In the United States, there's 24 million people that qualify for such a system. According to Morgan Stanley, it's a 320 billion dollar US market by 2045. Our focus is really today around restoring abilities. We're also partnering with health systems to curate what will become the world's first clinical app store for neurology to disrupt and create an environment for reprogramming the nervous system.

So today, our technology is being positioned as a DME provider. So people can purchase our headset with software for communication. Currently, there's existing reimbursement coding for speech generating devices that we will qualify for. And we're going to be launching our technology commercially in 2027. So just in summary, we've already achieved a global world record for non-invasive BCI at 44 words per minute. We have over 50 patent assets globally. We've raised 29 million dollars in seed capital. We are opening our series A. Our first close has been fully subscribed, and we have some additional capacity for some new allocations. The closing is in June, so if you're interested in learning more about being a part of the brain as the ultimate interface and helping us build this OS system to unlock nervous system healing, please let me know. My name is Andreas Forsland.