Synchron Brand Guidelines: A Melbourne Lab, New York & the Stentrode

Two researchers and a stent.

Synchron is a brain–computer interface company headquartered in New York, with an engineering hub in San Diego and an office in Melbourne, where its technology began. Its implant, the Stentrode, grew out of work at the University of Melbourne by the neurologist Thomas Oxley and the biomedical engineer Nicholas Opie. The European Patent Office, which named the pair finalists for its European Inventor Award in 2023, says the two met at the university — Opie recalls first meeting Oxley “in about 2011” — and that together they founded Synchron. English Wikipedia’s article on the Stentrode also names the cardiologist Rahul Sharma as a co-founder, and its article on Opie dates his co-founding of the company to 2012.

Accounts of where the idea began differ. Wikipedia says Opie and Oxley had been developing the implant since 2010, testing it in sheep, at the Vascular Bionics Laboratory in the University of Melbourne’s Department of Medicine, which Opie heads. The European Patent Office dates the idea to 2015, when the pair saw a stent retriever remove a blood clot from the brain and recognised that electronics could travel the same route. Oxley’s Wikipedia biography says his Melbourne team was funded by the U.S. defence research agency DARPA under its Reliable Neural-Interface Technology program, and that he trained in endovascular neurosurgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York from 2015 to 2017.

Synchron is privately funded. On 6 November 2025 the business news site Pulse 2.0 reported that it had closed a Series D financing led by Double Point Ventures, with existing backers including ARCH Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Bezos Expeditions, and new investors including Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund and the Qatar Investment Authority. The report said the money would expand the company’s Cognitive AI division in New York and its San Diego hardware team, and support pivotal trials and preparation for a commercial launch. Oxley is Synchron’s chief executive.

Through a vein, not the skull.

The Stentrode is, in short, a stent with electrodes. English Wikipedia describes platinum electrodes set into a nitinol stent about 5 centimetres long and up to 8 millimetres across; the European Patent Office compares it to the size of a paperclip. Instead of opening the skull, a surgeon guides it through the jugular vein into the superior sagittal sinus, the large vein between the brain’s two hemispheres, where the stent opens to place its electrodes beside the motor cortex, Mount Sinai explained in a report on its trial. A wire runs to a pacemaker-like unit implanted under the skin of the upper chest, and an external device placed over the chest picks up the signals.

The trial record is dated step by step. Wikipedia says human trials in Australia were approved by the ethics committee of St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, in November 2018 and began in August 2019, and that the FDA granted the device Breakthrough Device designation in August 2020. In the United States the implant entered the COMMAND study, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative; Mount Sinai reports that its neurovascular surgeon carried out the first U.S. Stentrode implant there in July 2022. By November 2025, Pulse 2.0 reported, Synchron had implanted the device in ten people across trials in the United States and Australia. The company states on its website that the Synchron BCI System is an investigational device, not approved for commercial use anywhere.

Software is the other half of the product. In May 2025 designboom reported that Synchron was the first company to achieve native integration between a brain–computer interface and Apple devices, using Apple’s new BCI Human Interface Device protocol to work with the Switch Control accessibility feature on iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro. The same article said that at NVIDIA’s GTC 2025 conference Synchron had shown Chiral, which the company calls a foundation model of human cognition trained on neural data.

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.

Agency, freedom, flourishing.

Synchron presents itself through a few short statements rather than a large corporate site. Its about page gives a vision — “to restore, extend and protect human agency” — and three ethical principles it names as agency, freedom and flourishing. It traces its method to cardiology: the company says it was inspired by the way stents and pacemakers are delivered by catheter in the cath lab, and it frames its own work as bringing electronics into the brain by the same route. Its about page ends with a disclaimer that its system is investigational.

Its public press list runs from 2018 to 2026. According to the company’s news page, TIME put Synchron on its Best Inventions of 2025 list and among its most influential New Frontiers companies of 2026, and Fast Company named it among the most innovative data science companies of 2026. The company’s site is synchron.com.

For a design guide, Synchron shows how a brain–computer interface company can borrow the familiar vocabulary of cardiology — stents, catheters, the cath lab — to explain something new. Compare Blackrock Neurotech, another brain–computer interface company, and NeuroPace, whose implant also records the brain’s electrical activity. For this guide we use a deep violet and a vessel coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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