XS Vision Raises $14 Million in Seed Funding for Visual Cortical Prosthesis Development
XS Vision, a Beijing-based invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) company, has completed a seed funding round of nearly 100 million yuan (approximately US$ 14 million) led by MPCi, with participation from LinkX Capital, Yanyuan Fund, and Tsinghua Innovatin Ventures. The funding will support the development of an invasive visual cortical prosthesis, advancing a vision reconstruction algorithm and a fully implantable BCI system through preclinical validation and core engineering team expansion.
The company was co-founded by Wang Qian (王茜) from Peking University’s School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and Li Yuanning (李远宁), who holds a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and neuroscience from Carnegie Mellon University and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco in Edward Chang’s laboratory, a leading BCI research group. The founding team also includes experts in embodied intelligence, BCI chips, and neuromorphic chips from Peking University.
Visual BCI is widely regarded as one of the most challenging directions in the field. XS Vision has proposed a “neural graphics card” concept with over 10,000 channels, aiming to encode visual information including images, colors, boundaries, and spatial structures into neural stimulation signals that the brain can interpret. The company’s long-term vision extends to enabling high-bandwidth human-computer interaction, potentially allowing direct semantic connectivity between the human brain and AI systems.
The company’s technical foundation draws from multiple areas of expertise. The founding team has accumulated petabytes of invasive electrophysiological and electrical stimulation data from the human visual cortex over more than a decade, covering single-neuron visual encoding and subjective visual perception reports evoked by cortical stimulation. In the field of neural decoding and reconstruction algorithms, team members have achieved state-of-the-art performance, including winning the Algonauts international challenge in 2021 and 2023, which tasks participants with predicting neural responses from visual stimuli.
XS Vision has outlined a phased clinical roadmap: near-term efforts focus on completing preclinical safety, biocompatibility, and electrical reliability validation of the fully implantable device; mid-term plans include initiating first-in-human studies, prioritizing patients with acquired blindness and intact visual pathways to verify the effectiveness and safety of visual perception reconstruction; long-term goals involve expanding to broader visual impairments and neurodegenerative diseases, establishing a scalable cortical prosthesis platform.
Yang Yi, a senior investment manager at MPCi, said that BCI underlying technologies have strong platform scalability, and core technologies such as neural decoding algorithms and high-throughput electrodes require clinical scenarios with clear technical logic for validation and iteration. She noted that the founding team’s data advantage—accumulated from over a decade of research and clinical work—positions the company to achieve deep synergy between data, algorithmic models, and systems engineering.
