BCI (brain-computer interface) technology — in which neural signals are routed from a person’s head to a computer — was once the stuff of science fiction, but these days the technology represents a competitive corner of the tech industry. One of the companies racing to commercialize BCI is Neurable, which this week announced that it’s looking to license its “mind-reading” technology to consumer wearables.
Neurable specializes in “non-invasive” BCI, which distinguishes itself from firms like Neuralink—the Elon Musk-founded startup known for inserting computer chips directly into people’s skulls—in that its product doesn’t require users to undergo brain surgery to enjoy its benefits.
Neurable’s technology works through a combination of EEG sensors and signal processing that can scan a user’s brain activity, analyze it with AI, and provide information about a person’s cognitive performance.
In December, Neurable raised $35 million in a series A, which it plans to use to scale the commercialization of its technology. This week, the company announced that, as part of its expansion effort, it is looking to license its technology to a variety of consumer-facing companies.
The idea is that mind-reading tech (which can provide detailed data about how a person’s brain works while they’re engaged in various activities) could be integrated into wearables across a number of industries—including health and athletic products, productivity tools, and gaming. “Through Neurable’s licensing platform, OEMs can directly integrate its AI-powered brain-sensing technology into existing hardware, such as headphones, hats, glasses, and headbands, while maintaining full control over product design, user experience, and distribution,” the company said in a press release on Tuesday.
Neurable has already fostered partnerships with a number of companies to test out its effectiveness. This includes HP Inc.’s HyperX, a gaming brand, with which it created a headset designed to help gamers “level up their game play by optimizing focus and performance.” It has also partnered with a company called iMotions, a software platform that specializes in human behavior research, to assist with the company’s research initiatives.
In an interview, Neurable’s CEO Ramses Alcaide declined to say what new partnerships the company has in the works, but said that the company was seeking to expand its purview across a host of domains.
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“In the past, we were very specific about our partnerships,” Alcaide said, noting that Neurable tended to home in on a particular company to prove that a unique commercial application was worthwhile. Now that they know expectations can be met on a number of fronts, the startup is focused on scaling itself, he said.
“What we’re doing now is we’re basically saying, like, ‘Hey, we’ve demonstrated that we’re getting great traction’,” Alcaide said. “Like, let’s make this as ubiquitous as heart rate sensors on your wrist, right?”
Despite the “non-invasive” label, brain data is arguably a little bit more intimate than the information culled from a heart rate sensor, so what kind of privacy protections does a company like Neurable provide?
Alcaide said that the company ensures that user data is “protected and anonymized.” The company’s privacy policy provides a variety of different guidelines for when and how a user’s data might be accessed and used. “We make sure we follow HIPAA standards, like we’ve gone above and beyond where a lot of startups would be at our stage to make sure that we protect the data, we encrypt it, and that we anonymize it,” Alcaide said.
Does Neurable leverage a user’s neural data to train its AI software?, we asked. “We can with user consent, right?” said Alcaide. “But we do it in a very specific way.” That specific way involves asking the user whether their data can be used for the purposes of particular experiments, Alcaide said. “We are not collecting the data, just training on it willy nilly,” he said. In other words, this kind of data usage is quite targeted.
Alcaide said that his industry is at an “inflection point”—one wherein there finally exists “a real business model in neuro-technology that is scalable.” What comes after that inflection point is the big question.
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BY NKECHI NAECHE-ESEZOBOR—The National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) has organized a specialized one-day training program for officers of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), FCT Command, aimed at strengthening the enforcement of Motor Third-Party Insurance and other compulsory policies across Nigerian roads.
The initiative, held in Abuja, focused on equipping law enforcement officers with advanced skills to fast-track insurance policy verification and eliminate the proliferation of fake insurance certificates.
The training was themed “Building a Culture of Insurance Compliance: Police as Catalysts for Protecting Lives, Property and Enhancing Public Safety.” It was designed to empower officers to promote statutory compliance, verify the authenticity of insurance covers during routine checks, and help deepen public appreciation of insurance benefits.
Speaking on behalf of the Commissioner for Insurance/CEO of NAICOM, Mr. Olusegun Ayo Omosehin, Mr. Ekerete Ola Gam-Ikon underscored the strategic importance of the collaboration between the regulatory body and the NPF.
He noted that effective public safety extends beyond traditional crime prevention to shielding citizens from the severe financial consequences of unforeseen disasters.
“Insurance serves as a vital social and economic safety net, providing protection for individuals, families, businesses, and public institutions against losses arising from accidents, disasters, and other risks,” Mr. Gam-Ikon stated.
He added that the partnership is critical to reducing the high volume of uninsured vehicles on the roads, protecting commuters, curbing the use of counterfeit insurance certificates, and boosting public trust in regulatory institutions. These objectives, he emphasized, directly align with the provisions of the newly enacted Nigerian Insurance Industry Reform Act (NIIRA) 2025 and NAICOM’s mandate to deepen market penetration.
The commission highlighted the unique leverage the Nigeria Police Force possesses due to its daily interactions with motorists, business owners, and the public. By strictly enforcing compulsory insurance laws, police officers act as key drivers in reducing accident-related financial hardships and enhancing overall public safety.
During the technical sessions, participants received practical training on:
The core objectives and benefits of compulsory insurance lines.
Standardized digital and manual insurance policy verification procedures.
The foolproof identification of genuine insurance certificates.
The legal framework governing compliance under NIIRA 2025.
The program successfully strengthened the institutional bridge between NAICOM and the NPF, encouraging officers to act not just as law enforcers, but as grassroots advocates for insurance literacy.
Long-Term Commitment
Moving forward, NAICOM reaffirmed its commitment to sustaining close ties with law enforcement and relevant stakeholders to eliminate fake insurance vendors, improve nationwide compliance levels, and position the insurance sector as a meaningful contributor to Nigeria’s economic growth and social stability.
The Commission urged the officers of the FCT Command to champion this cause, fostering an environment where insurance is embraced not merely as a statutory obligation, but as an indispensable tool for safeguarding lives, investments, and livelihoods.
With ZML/LLMD, the newly launched LLM inference server, the company’s ambition is to break existing silos and make different chips available for AI use cases at their maximum available speed, and sometimes faster, ZML founder Steeve Morin told TechCrunch.
As AI becomes integrated into our work and everyday lives, optimizing inference — aka, the processing of prompts — has been outpacing model training in importance, but often feels patchy behind the scenes, with software and architecture barriers that lead to vendor lock-in, Morin said.
The promise of achieving peak performance across a variety of chips is a technological feat, but it could also be a market disruptor, amid mounting fears over AI-related costs.
ZML hopes to provide enterprises and clouds with the option to use a mix of chips, some of which might be less costly or consume less energy. “The idea is to give people back the power to create their own system and achieve real efficiency gains that allow [AI] to be disseminated,” Morin said.
Such a software assist may help novel AI chipmakers, many of which happen to be from Europe, Morin observed, citing Axelera, Fractile, Kalray, OLIX, Q.ANT, SiPearl, SpiNNcloud, and VSORA. But more than their region of origin, what matters to him is that ZML can work with them on “things that haven’t been done before anywhere in the world.”
That doesn’t mean Morin is bearish on Nvidia. He’s not, in part because of its existing supply. He told TechCrunch that ZML has a good relationship with the AI chip giant, which has been gearing up for the rise of inference.
Both vLLM and SGLang partially compete with LLMD, but Morin’s ambitions for ZML cover a broader spectrum. “We have reached the point where we are co-designing silicon,” he said. He further credited ZML’s lean team of 20 people as the reason why the Paris-based startup has been able to move fast, with more releases in the plans.
It also helped that this small team is well funded for its size. Thanks to his track record as VP of engineering of Zenly, which Snapchat acquired for nine figures in 2017, Morin raised $20 million from venture firms including Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, >commit, AALVC, Drysdale Ventures, Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures, Kindred Capital, LocalGlobe, and Puzzle Ventures.
Unlike ZML’s first public project, the inference-focused ML framework released in 2024 and updated in March, ZML/LLMD is not open source. But it is launching as a free product with the goal of learning about usage. “I’d rather measure and [then generate revenue] where it is most effective without hindering my growth stupidly because I have been too greedy from the get-go,” Morin said.
It is too early to tell when ZML/LLMD might become a paid product, and what its adoption will look like. But the startup’s cap table confirms that other founders are paying attention, including Dagger and Docker founder Solomon Hykes, Clément Delangue and Julien Chaumond from Hugging Face, as well LeCun, now with AMI Labs. This also builds the case that Europe’s AI startups can now build from home. “I couldn’t do ZML anywhere but in Paris,” Morin said.
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