Blackrock Neurotech Brand Guidelines: The Utah Array, Salt Lake City 2008 & Tether

A Utah lab, two friends and an older array.

Blackrock Neurotech began in 2008 as Blackrock Microsystems, a small company in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company says it was started by two friends, the engineer Florian Solzbacher and Marcus Gerhardt; its website today lists Gerhardt as co-founder and chief executive and Solzbacher, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Utah, as a co-founder. A University of Utah news item from July 2015, republishing an article by EDCUtah, the state’s economic development body, described Blackrock Microsystems as “a small Utah company that sprang from a University of Utah lab in 2008,” named Gerhardt as a founding partner and gave Solzbacher’s title then as president and executive chairman.

The technology at the centre of the company is older than the company. The Utah Array, a microelectrode array that records signals from neurons in the brain’s outer layer, was developed at the University of Utah by Richard A. Normann; Blackrock’s own timeline dates its invention to 1989. The trade newsletter Neurotech Reports traced the chain of ownership in July 2010. Normann founded Bionic Technologies to market the array; in 2002 Bionics was merged into Cyberkinetics, of Foxborough, Massachusetts, which built the array into its BrainGate system; and when Cyberkinetics wound down its operations, Blackrock Microsystems, “of Salt Lake, UT,” acquired its microelectrode arrays and acquisition systems in 2008.

“Blackrock was founded in 2008 to take over the microarray manufacturing and marketing operations,” Neurotech Reports wrote. The BrainGate patents and name went to a separate buyer, so the Utah company took over the hardware rather than the trial programme’s brand. It now trades as Blackrock Neurotech, and its website gives its headquarters as Salt Lake City.

Electrodes, a headstage and a signal processor.

Blackrock describes itself as a maker of brain–computer interfaces, or BCIs: systems that record electrical activity from neurons and translate it into commands for a computer or another device. Its website says the Utah Array is “also called the NeuroPort Electrode” and that it has been implanted in humans since 2004, when it was used in the BrainGate clinical trials. Neurotech Reports wrote in 2010 that the NeuroPort data acquisition system, by then made by Blackrock, had FDA approval for short-term recording and monitoring of brain electrical activity during and after surgery, and that in 2009 Blackrock obtained FDA approval for the system to be used with other manufacturers’ electrodes.

The company presents its products as an ecosystem rather than a single device: implantable electrodes, a headstage that connects to them, a Neural Signal Processor and software. Its website addresses researchers and clinicians separately. The company says more than 1,000 research customers use its technology and counts more than 2,000 published studies; the 2015 EDCUtah article put its users at approximately 500 organisations and neuroscientists. The company also says that nearly all BCIs implanted in humans have used its technology; that is its own claim.

Its history page credits research groups, not the company, with most of the milestones it lists: a 2002 Brown University study in which monkeys with Utah Arrays moved a computer cursor; the BrainGate trials from 2004; work at the University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins University and Ohio State University with Battelle; and a 2021 study at the University of California, San Francisco, which the company says used a Blackrock-built electrode and recording system to decode whole words. In 2015, EDCUtah reported, the Utah Array was featured in the online broadcast of President Obama’s State of the Union address.

The company’s next step, by its own account, is a medical product. It says its planned MoveAgain device, built around the Utah Array, received a Breakthrough Device designation from the FDA in 2021, and it describes the device as upcoming.

Design and documentation.

Neuromodulation companies sell devices that most people will never see. Spinal cord stimulators, sacral nerve stimulators, hypoglossal nerve implants and brain-computer interfaces sit under the skin or inside the skull, so the companies that make them have to show something else: the scale of the device, the place it sits in the body, and the people it is meant for.

A few images recur across the category. Implants are often photographed held between fingertips or beside a coin or a key fob, to make their size legible. X-ray-style renders show thin leads running along a spine or curving toward a nerve, with the generator drawn as a small rounded shape. Patient pages tend to use calm portraits at home, on walks or with family, rather than hospital scenes.

Brain-computer interface start-ups lean in another direction: glowing renders of the brain, electrode arrays magnified many times over, and photographs of lab benches, engineers and surgical teams. Their audience includes investors and researchers as much as doctors, and the imagery often reads as a promise about the future rather than a product shot.

The category also has its own meeting places. Trade congresses such as the North American Neuromodulation Society (NANS) meeting, the International Neuromodulation Society (INS) congress and the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting are where companies show booths, posters and new hardware to clinicians and scientists. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — founding, ownership, products and approvals as dated sources state them — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A crypto company as majority owner.

In April 2024 the company changed hands. Tether, the company behind a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, took a majority stake in Blackrock Neurotech through its venture arm, Tether Evo, Reuters reported on 29 April 2024. The deal had closed the previous Friday after several months of due diligence, and Tether’s chief executive told Reuters it made Tether the largest shareholder. Tether said the money would mainly fund the commercialisation and roll-out of Blackrock’s technology, which its statement said had been used with more than 40 people. The company’s website now lists two investors, Christian Angermayer and Tim Sievers, as co-chairmen of its board.

The name needs care. Reuters noted that the company “has no relation to the asset manager BlackRock,” and the two are written differently: the asset manager with a capital R, the neurotechnology company as Blackrock, with a lower-case r, followed by Neurotech. The earlier name, Blackrock Microsystems, still appears in older trade coverage, and the University of Utah article of 2015 used it throughout.

The company tells its story through research partners and dates. Its history page is a timeline running from 1989 to 2022, and its news section republishes coverage from titles such as IEEE Spectrum, Wired and The Scientist alongside journal papers. Its pages describe four uses for its technology: neuroprosthetics, computer control, communication and sensory restoration.

For a design guide, Blackrock Neurotech shows how a component maker can build a brand on a single piece of hardware and the research done with it. Compare Synchron, another brain–computer interface company, and NeuroPace, another company building devices for the brain. For this guide we use a basalt black and an electrode copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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