Anyone who has seen the movie "Avatar" will not forget this scene: On the planet Pandora, Jake Sully, a former Marine paralyzed from the waist down, lies in a sealed chamber. Using a device worn on his head, he controls a man-made Na'vi hybrid with his mind.
This is the initial fantasy of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) for most people—allowing human intention to transcend the body's boundaries and directly connect to another carrier. Now, with the maturation of AI, embodied intelligence, and other industrial chains, this imagination has the possibility of becoming reality. A landmark financing has thus emerged:
Investment Community learned that Wabo Technology has announced the completion of a new round of financing, jointly invested by Vertex Ventures (a subsidiary of Singapore's Temasek), Hongtai Capital, Chengdu Future Industry Fund under Chengdu Sci-tech Investment Group, and Huifengda Capital. Among them, Vertex Ventures is well-known for an early bet on Unitree Technology.
Taking this opportunity, Investment Community had a conversation with Zhang Xingzhi, founder of Wabo Technology. He is an entrepreneur with a strong geek-romantic temperament: as a teenager, he was struck by the scenes in "Avatar," which sparked a pursuit lasting over a decade. It wasn't until last year, sensing the timing was ripe, that he officially entered the field to establish Wabo Technology.
His calm words hint at a sci-fi cyber world quietly arriving.
Tsinghua PhD Leads the Team, Enabling AI to Understand Human Intent
It was the sci-fi scenes in the movie "Avatar" that opened a new world for Zhang Xingzhi.
How can humans map goals, choices, and movement intentions onto another body, extending their own capabilities in the physical world? The seed of exploration was thus planted—starting from his undergraduate studies, he focused his research on "human-computer interaction."
But at that time, brain-computer interfaces were still confined to imagination. Therefore, he chose to start from first principles, first deeply engaging with key industrial sectors such as manufacturing, consumer electronics, and supply chains. Later, he took problems from the industry back to academia to find answers, entering Tsinghua University to continue his studies, pursuing a master's and then a doctoral degree, applying the accumulated industrial puzzles to academic inquiry. While seemingly shuttling back and forth between industry and academia, he always revolved around the same core theme—how to enable machines to truly understand and execute human intentions in a more natural and less burdensome way. Each trip brought him closer to that dream originating from "Avatar."
Finally, in 2025, the best timing arrived.
The "15th Five-Year Plan" identified brain-computer interfaces as a forward-looking future industry. Simultaneously, the development of technologies such as flexible electrodes, low-power chips, edge-side AI, and spatial computing terminals has enabled non-invasive brain-computer interfaces to begin having industrialization potential.
Sensing the timing was mature, Zhang Xingzhi founded Wabo Technology at the end of last year. Established around the same time and also based in Chengdu, Wabo Technology, which adheres to a non-invasive route, and Gestalt Technology, which follows an ultrasonic brain-computer interface route, were quickly seen by the outside world as the "Chengdu BCI Twin Stars."
However, unlike most BCI companies focusing on a single medical scenario or BCI hardware, Wabo Technology chose to focus on more fundamental matters. As Zhang Xingzhi believes, Wabo Technology's positioning is more akin to a model company.
After a decade of development, artificial intelligence can already understand language, images, sound, and actions, but machines still lack a crucial type of data: what does a person truly intend to do before they actually take action? For example, a camera can see a person pick up a cup but doesn't know if they intend to drink from it or return it to its place—a robot can mimic the movement trajectory but struggles to understand when a person confirms, hesitates, corrects an error, or when they want the machine to stop immediately.
This is the problem Wabo Technology aims to solve. Currently, the team is building a "Human Neural Intent Model"—a system for neural signal representation and decoding oriented towards real-world tasks: within clear task, environmental, and temporal contexts, it integrates EEG, EMG, behavior, vision, device state, and execution results to judge the user's current goal, action tendency, confirmation, correction, stop, or takeover intent, and translates these into standardized "intent vectors" that machines can understand.
Zhang Xingzhi explains that Wabo Technology's Neural Intent Model has three key characteristics: First, task conditioning, which means letting the model know what the user is doing and what the legal options are. Second, generalization across users, time, and devices, reducing the time needed for retraining and lengthy calibration each time. Third, closed-loop capability. "Truly reliable brain-computer interaction not only needs to correctly recognize when the user explicitly issues a command but also needs to remain silent when the user is distracted, blinks, speaks, moves, or has no control intent." Only when machines learn both "when to execute" and "when not to execute" can neural signals potentially move from lab demonstrations to broader markets.
By then, the application boundaries of BCI will far exceed today's imagination: it can not only empower medical rehabilitation and integrate into smart homes and embodied intelligence... but even the fantasy of interstellar colonization and consciousness connection from "Avatar" will gradually approach reality through the continuous iteration of models.
Investors Come Knocking, Establishing "Chengdu + Shanghai" Dual Headquarters
When he decided to start a business, Zhang Xingzhi left himself almost no way out.
Judging that the industry window was opening, Zhang Xingzhi did not hesitate much but instead invested his years of savings into it. As Zhang Xingzhi puts it, he is a person with relatively low material desires, who simply genuinely wants to make this happen, hence choosing to go all in.
Perhaps like-minded people always attract each other. Starting from a solo venture, Zhang Xingzhi quickly attracted a group of like-minded partners—a core team with an average age under 30, combining geek temperament and full-stack capabilities, gradually took shape.
Of course, more experienced research power is indispensable. At the underlying R&D level, Wabo Technology has already gathered brain-computer interface, neural engineering, and neural intent research forces from universities like Tianjin University and Fudan University, forming an interdisciplinary team of scientists to systematically advance the underlying research, data systems, and closed-loop verification of the Human Neural Intent Model.
Soon, investors came knocking intensively.
Within less than five months of actual operation, Wabo Technology completed its seed round of financing invested by Ceyuan Capital. Almost simultaneously with the completion of the seed round, this angel round of financing also began. Some investment institutions, in order to catch this financing window, even brought their entire post-investment and risk control teams directly to Wabo Technology's site, completing due diligence and decision-making within a week.
One of the main investors in this round, Vertex Ventures, an early investor in Unitree Technology which is about to go public on the STAR Market, was precisely attracted by Wabo Technology's impressive systematic capabilities in data acquisition, signal processing, device control, model training, and engineering implementation. This allowed this capital, which has been frequently deploying in the Physical AI field in recent years, to smell the next huge opportunity.
To some extent, this represents a common judgment among investors—what is truly scarce is not a single hardware parameter, but the complete system that stably delivers neural signals into real-world scenarios and continuously transforms results into model capabilities.
The greater significance lies in the fact that the brain-computer interface is just an entry point. The other end of the interface can be drones, robotic arms, humanoid robots... Thus, we see that investors who previously focused on embodied intelligence and commercial aerospace have also cast their votes for Wabo Technology—not betting on a particular BCI hardware product, but on a layer of cross-device reusable human intent representation.
Especially in the weightless environment of space, traditional methods relying on gestures, voice, or even physical interfaces face limitations; BCI will become the most natural and important mode of interaction. Furthermore, for long-term stays on manned space stations, extreme environments like space weightlessness, confinement, and radiation can easily cause astronaut neural fatigue and cognitive decline. Space BCI can enable real-time monitoring of astronauts' brain states and dynamic regulation of cognitive load. It will be a key core technology for the new generation of manned aerospace human-machine integration systems.
Looking globally, China and the US are currently simultaneously deploying in-orbit BCI experiments, but commercial solutions meeting the stringent standards of aerospace (miniaturization, low power consumption, radiation resistance, high stability) and possessing engineering implementation capabilities remain scarce. It is worth mentioning that Wabo Technology, in collaboration with Tianjin University, is already leading the industry in such more cutting-edge directions. The Tianjin University BCI team is a pioneer in the field of space brain-computer interaction in China, having developed self-made equipment that ascended with the Tiangong-2 and Shenzhou-11 missions, completing the world's first scientific experiment of in-orbit brain-computer interaction in space.
Wabo Technology's frontier exploration in "Space BCI" has also allowed Hongtai Capital, which has been frequently deploying in the commercial aerospace field in recent years, to see another path with enormous imaginative space.
Although a latecomer, Wabo Technology is rapidly evolving. "Whether it's the control objects or the smoothness and accuracy of control, etc., everything is being updated and iterated on a weekly basis. It's a completely new experience for investors every time they visit." This also impressed the investors. It is reported that several investors have already extended olive branches to Wabo Technology, hoping to secure shares in the next round.
More promisingly, Wabo Technology is about to reach another milestone—it has completed landing对接对接 with the Minhang District Government of Shanghai and the "Brain Intelligence Hub" and will officially enter as a brain-computer interface innovation center project incubated by Fudan University. It is important to know that the "Brain Intelligence Hub" is a key future industry cluster for brain-computer interfaces being built by Shanghai, the first of its kind in the country, where leading domestic BCI companies gather. After landing, Wabo Technology plans to initiate a dual-headquarters layout in Chengdu and Shanghai.
In terms of division of labor, the Shanghai headquarters will focus on high-end R&D, the neural intent model, closed-loop neural regulation, and industry-academia-research-medicine collaboration. The Chengdu headquarters will focus on hardware and product R&D, supply chain, engineering delivery, and scaled scenario applications, thus forming the simultaneous construction of two sets of capabilities: "cutting-edge research and industrial engineering."
Welcoming the Cyber World
Wabo Technology is like a microcosm: the brain-computer interface era is beginning to explode.
According to incomplete statistics, in the first five months of 2026, there were over 30 financing events in China's BCI field, with a total financing amount exceeding 4.5 billion RMB, far surpassing the scale of the entire year of 2025. "Almost all directions can secure funding," lamented an investor focusing on this area.
Standing at the industry front line, Zhang Xingzhi feels the changes even more clearly. "In the past, capital paid more attention to the medical device attributes or single-point scientific research achievements of BCI. Now, investors from fields like embodied intelligence, artificial intelligence, consumer electronics, and commercial aerospace are beginning to re-understand the cross-disciplinary value of BCI."
In Zhang Xingzhi's view, the future competition in BCI is not just about a particular hardware device, but about who can build the capability to continuously generate data, train models, and enter more physical scenarios.
The answer Wabo Technology provides is to use neural signals like EEG and EMG as data entry points. In clear task environments, it aligns neural signals, user behavior, scene information, and execution results to form a continuously trainable neural intent model. Then, through the WABO Interface, it translates human intent into control signals that physical terminals like robots, XR, smart home devices, and spacecraft can invoke.
In this system, Wabo Technology's products like "Lingxi" (Spirit Thread) and "Zhimengzhe" (Dream Weaver) are not the end goal but important entry points for acquiring real data. Terminals reach users, users generate feedback in real scenarios, data drives continuous model iteration, improved model capabilities further enhance product experience, ultimately forming a long-term closed loop of "neural data entry—intent model—physical control—data feedback."
This is also a point investors particularly value. Compared to simply accumulating EEG data, Wabo Technology focuses more on the task relationships behind the data: in what scenario did the user generate what neural signal, how does the model understand this intent, whether the machine execution succeeded, and whether the user confirmed, corrected, or took over. Truly valuable data is not isolated waveforms but the complete chain of "task—intent—action—result."
Discussing the future industry competitive landscape, Zhang Xingzhi predicts it won't be a winner-takes-all situation for a single technology route. Players in directions like invasive/non-invasive, consumer neural interaction, core components, data models, etc., can all find their place in the industry. But before that, they must overcome a series of challenges including scene generalization, cross-user/subject applicability, safety boundaries, data standards, cost, mass production, and commercialization needs.
"In the next three years, the BCI industry will see real differentiation." In Zhang Xingzhi's view, those that ultimately remain will inevitably be the few companies that can truly run through the closed loop of data, models, and scenarios.
And further ahead, that imagination born from "Avatar" is getting closer step by step.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Investment Community" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Wu Qiong
