A San Francisco startup called Sabi says the next way to talk to AI may be a hat. The company announced Thursday that it raised a $50 million seed round, led by Khosla Ventures, to build a brain-to-AI interface that looks like an ordinary baseball cap.
How it is supposed to work
According to the company, sensors hidden inside the cap pick up neural signals through the wearer's hair, with no gel, no surgery and no direct contact with the scalp. Those readings go to what Sabi calls a Brain Foundation Model, which the company says was trained on more than 100,000 hours of labeled neural recordings. The goal is to translate imagined speech and intent into commands for AI tools, so a user could prompt an assistant without typing or speaking.
Forbes reported that the prototype is lined with up to 100,000 tiny sensor chips, each one to five millimeters across, and that the founders first tried a four-pound helmet before deciding nobody would want to wear one. To gather training data, Sabi hired more than 100 people to wear headsets while reading, speaking, thinking and listening, Forbes said.
Who is paying for it
Accel, Initialized Capital, DST Global, Collaborative Fund, Ascend and former OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil also joined the round. Forbes, citing a person familiar with the deal, reported that the investment values the two-year-old company at $600 million.
Vinod Khosla framed the bet around surgery-free hardware. "You cannot perform a billion brain surgeries to replace a billion keyboards," he said in the company's announcement. CEO Rahul Chhabra co-founded Sabi with CTO Atmadeep Banerjee, a co-author of MindEye, a 2023 research paper on decoding images people viewed from noninvasive brain scans.
Still early
There is no product to buy yet. Sabi says it will spend the money growing its neural dataset, finishing a custom chip, making early devices and hiring, and it is preparing units for people on an early-access waitlist. Forbes described the concept as nascent and largely unproven, and reported that the company plans to show it at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The round is another sign of how much money is flowing to Bay Area AI startups, even ones that are still building their first device.