Brain-computer interfaces, but make it couture
Voyage founder Khalil Ismail thinks neurotech needs to crack the desire problem
The launch video is becoming a prerequisite for buzzy, venture-backed startups. So much so that it can be hard to stand out amid the flow of fast cuts and carefully selected fonts.
So it was notable when a short film came across my feed earlier this month that looked less like a demo day or a documentary, and more like Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. “The Maison is opening”, read the intriguing caption.
Put out to announce the launch of “mind computing” startup Voyage, which has just secured its first funding round, the video features the company’s founder Khalil Ismail reading a poem of his own composition. Against the backdrop of an English country house, he and other figures stroll around the maze and the dining hall, while electronic music worthy of a Balenciaga show plays.
I had many questions after watching it, so I found Ismail’s website (where he lists not only his credentials but favourite writers, philosophers, and fashion week collections) and got in touch.
“We wanted to subvert the idea that frontier tech companies have to be unsexy,” he tells me on a call from San Francisco. “I went to art school and engineering school, and I think this DNA of having both sides is really important to us. So we wanted to lead with the artistry.”
One certainly gets the sense from Ismail’s CV of someone who is not content to be pigeonholed on one side or the other. He has written poetry since he was a teenager, and has studied or worked on technical challenges as varied as product design, spatial computing, wearables, and memory augmentation. He has a penchant for a full plate, often doing two or more projects at the same time.
“I’ve always grown up between two general worlds of technology and liberal arts,” he explains. His time at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, though, was a turning point for how he thought about combining the two. “I almost saw art school as the antidote to big tech.” It inspired him to think of the two worlds not as separate categories but as more of a symbiosis.
The short version of what Voyage does, or hopes to do, is to fill a gap in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. By capturing and translating brain signals into commands, this type of technology promises to remove a layer between thought and action, removing the need to type, speak or use eye movements.
Most people are familiar with the field because of Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, which makes coin-sized devices that can be implanted in the skull. But it’s a field with a surprisingly long history, going back to the 1970s. More recently, it’s been a frequent source of good news thanks to a series of scientific breakthroughs, including advances in helping disabled people to communicate. China is also gaining ground here, having approved the world’s first commercial invasive BCI system earlier this year.
But Ismail believes there is still something missing from the ambitions of scientists and companies building these solutions: a reason for consumers to adopt them. While there have been some new products designed to be non-invasive (i.e. not implanted into the body like Neuralink), they’re not always appealing to the eye, usually resembling chunky headphones or swimming caps.
Voyage approaches this space with an aesthetic question: What do people actually want to wear?
This isn’t just a question of how to sell these devices to consumers, Ismail argues, but a vital problem to tackle in order to advance the technology.
“For the past few years we’ve sort of stagnated in our ability to miniaturise, and also collect data,” he says. “The biggest bottleneck in neuro is just naturalistic data.”
Getting that information is crucial, as we’ve also seen playing out in robotics, but requires more real-life usage. Voyage’s hope is that a non-invasive product, which is actually seen as desirable by the wearer, will increase consumer adoption, and be the best way to expand the datasets.
“If we focus on the desire problem as a deep tech company, then we’ll solve a lot of the technical hurdles that we have.”
Based on that thesis, Voyage just raised an undisclosed amount in a round led by Draper Associates. Follow on funds came from Upside Ventures, the University of Oxford, Olive Tree Capital, Genesis Fund, and angel investors.
To deliver on the vision, Ismail believes that the commitment to design and desirability has to come from inside the organisation, rather than just resting on collabs between tech and fashion, à la the Kylie Jenner Meta glasses.
“It has to happen from the inside out, and that’s why I think a new kind of company type was needed to do this. You can’t do it in a traditional lab.”
The ‘Maison’, a couturier-inspired term, is the company’s “outer shell”, he explains. For that, he’s hiring people in creative roles, including at least one Artisan/Maker. Then Voyage is the R&D core of the project, currently recruiting “Technical Philosophers”. Every org chart needs a bit of lore.
Though Ismail says his heart is in London and feels a company like this could only come out of Europe, much of his hiring energy at the moment is necessarily focused on the Bay Area. “We have some really great institutions, and for anything neuro, bio, ML, the UK is incredible. But for applied hardware, I struggled to find people.” So for now at least, the company will be split between London and San Francisco.
And what will the resulting product actually look like? Ismail keeps it vague at this stage. When you watch the launch video again, there are subtle details that might just be decorative, or might be clues about where the company thinks wearables are going. Everyone is wearing sleek metallic accessories – over-ear cuffs, armour rings, watches. In this vision, BCIs of the future could look normal. Chic, even.
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🖥️ For further reading on the launch video boom, I really recommend this interview by katie with Afterimage. They didn’t make the Voyage video but have been behind many other timeline-dominating films of late.
🇬🇧 Many projects and teams are still in limbo following the DSIT closure last week. Data Center Dynamics reports that a new home for AI Growth Zones, for example, have yet to be decided
🍦 This evening event with speakers from Raycast, Notion, and OpenAI on the 13th of August looks interesting.
💷 The FCA is launching a new push to revive London share trading, per the Financial Times.
💡 Sebastian Mallaby has a couple of quibbles in his review of Theo Baker’s new book How to Rule the World.