About PL Neuro Salons

PL Neuro Salons are a series of small, invite-only meetings whose purpose is to accelerate the development of next generation technologies – like neural augmentation and human-like AI – in a manner that is targeted to benefit humanity. Toward this goal, PL Neuro Salons bring together a deliberately cross-disciplinary group of scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and philanthropists with technical expertises across multiple disciplines of neuroscience and AI.

The PL Neuro Salon 2025: Roadmapping the Neurotech Commons

Human neural interface technology is at a turning point with significant investment in new devices and companies each year. As these devices enter clinical trials, large-scale human neural data collection is on the near-term horizon. This provides the opportunity to collect sufficient data to unlock insights about how brains compute that transcend biology and inform a substrate-independent “science of intelligence”. This, in turn, would qualitatively expand the capacities of next generation neurotechnologies, hastening their development, commercialization, and adoption.

Ensuring this outcome, however, requires an alignment of priorities across key stakeholders in the field such that the human neural data that is collected is useful not only for the clinical goals of current neural interface companies, but also for pushing forward intelligence science.

Goals

A major goal of the PL Neurotech Founders Retreat is to generate actionable 5 year roadmaps for each of the four session themes:

1. Unlocking $100B in venture capital

2. Smoothing the path to clinical revenue

3. Transitioning to consumer products

4. Preparing the public

For each of these sessions, our roadmaps should describe:

1. The state of neurotech today;

2. Our shared ideal state of the field in 5 years; and

3. Well-defined actionable steps that PL specially – and other actors more generally – can begin to take today to move the field towards the desired state.

These roadmaps can serve multiple functions. First, they inform and prioritize PL’s work and resource allocation. We want the companies PL is serving to feel confident that progress in the “neurotech commons” will occur without it needing to stem from their own work in isolation. This can allow companies to focus on their individual strengths. Second, these roadmaps may surface heretofore underexplored/unappreciated gaps that can rally actors (PL and others) towards solutions. Finally, one or more of these roadmaps can be published and disseminated such that key stakeholders like the public, patient groups, legislatures, regulators, payors, etc. are aware that the neurotech industry is thoughtfully tackling hard, shared problems whose solutions will allow the technology that is being developed to benefit more people faster.

While these roadmaps can and should address the needs of the neurotech field as a whole, it is also reasonable at times to narrow the scope of focus to the eight companies in attendance at the PL Neurotech Founders Retreat:

1. Blackrock

2. Echo

3. Integral

4. Motif

5. Paradromics

6. Precision

7. Science

8. Synchron

What to expect

This is a working meeting, not a conference.

The Salon will commence with a series of keynotes that frame the current state of neuroscience, neurotechnology, and AI. The core working sessions comprise short introductory framing remarks followed by breakout discussions focused on specific sub-topics. The goal is to clarify open problems, test assumptions, and surface areas of potential alignment. The rest of the schedule is designed to leave room for informal conversations and creative thinking.

There are no required presentations unless previously arranged.

Before the retreat

We ask all participants to read the Program and Attendee document in advance. It provides greater depth on the program and its scientific rationale as well as the intended outcomes of the retreat. It also lists the Salon attendees.