While Elon Musk grabs headlines with Neuralink’s flashy demos, Valve’s Gabe Newell quietly built something that might help people. His brain chip startup, Starfish Neuroscience, just announced that their first medical devices will ship in late 2025, and they’re taking a radically different approach.
Forget the sci-fi nonsense about downloading memories or playing games with your thoughts. Starfish focuses on fixing broken brains, not upgrading healthy ones.
Why This Beats Neuralink’s Approach
Neuralink’s N1 chip measures 6×6 mm and burns through 6 milliwatts of power, requiring regular wireless charging sessions. Starfish’s design runs on just 1.1 milliwatts and needs zero battery maintenance.
Your smartphone dies after a day of heavy use. Now imagine that happening inside your skull.
Starfish solves this by distributing multiple tiny chips across different brain regions instead of cramming everything into one massive implant. Think mesh network versus single tower—more coverage, less failure risk. These kinds of distributed systems are the real breakthrough innovations that could change the future of brain health.
The Medical Reality Check
Parkinson’s patients deal with tremors, depression sufferers battle chemical imbalances, and epilepsy patients face unpredictable seizures. These aren’t problems you solve with a gaming interface or Twitter integration.
Starfish targets circuit-level brain dysfunction by accessing multiple regions simultaneously. Current treatments often work like trying to fix a car’s electrical system by only touching the battery—you need distributed access to solve distributed problems.
The startup isn’t just throwing chips at walls hoping something sticks. They’re developing precision hyperthermia devices for tumor destruction and robotically guided magnetic stimulation systems. Real medical tools for real medical problems. With more brain data being collected than ever before, the industry must also address the growing neural privacy gap to ensure patient safety and trust.
