Today's signal
Sabi, a startup backed by Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, came out of stealth this week with a product that sounds like science fiction: a knitted cap with embedded neuroimaging sensors that reads your brain signals and lets AI agents act on your thoughts. No clicking. No typing. No surgery. Just wear the hat and think.
Why it matters
Every serious brain-computer interface company before Sabi has led with the hardware, bulky medical headsets, or worse, a surgical implant drilled into your skull. Sabi flipped that playbook entirely. They built the world's largest neural decoding dataset first, trained what they call a Brain Foundation Model on it, and then designed custom sensors around what the model actually needed. That is the exact sequence that made large language models work: data and model first, hardware second. The result is a 1mm-footprint neuroimaging sensor small enough to embed in a wearable cap. The pitch is not a medical device. It is a consumer computing paradigm. Their own words: "the last paradigm of computing."
The take
Most BCI companies are building for the hospital. Sabi is building for the living room, and Vinod Khosla putting his name behind it is not a casual bet. Khosla does not fund novelty hardware. He backed Synchron and Science Corp. when almost no one believed in non-surgical BCIs. If the data-first thesis holds and the Brain Foundation Model generalizes well across users, Sabi could be to brain-computer interfaces what the iPhone was to touchscreens. Not the first, but the first one you actually want to use. That is a very large if. But it is a credible one.
The number
The BCI market is projected to grow from $2.87 billion in 2024 to $15.14 billion by 2035. Sabi is not chasing a slice of that market. It is betting it can redefine the category entirely.
Want the deeper take? Read the full analysis on analyticsdrift.com.