A worm’s brain walked me into a 14-name basket of stocks.
Scientists have already completed a full digital map of a microscopic roundworm called C. elegans — every neuron, every connection. Last year, they did it for a marine worm with three times as many neurons. It’s the kind of milestone that doesn’t make the front page of the Wall Street Journal, but it should.
Because if you can map a worm’s brain, the next question becomes: how long until a mouse? How long until a human? And what technologies have to scale for that to happen?
When I started thinking about that question seriously, I did what 28 years on a trading desk teaches you to do: I flipped to the supply chain. Who makes the chips this math runs on. Who builds the electron microscopes that image the tissue. Who sequences the proteins. Who makes the memory that’s now the real bottleneck.
Most of those companies are already public. Several of them are trading at market caps that don’t remotely reflect what happens if the underlying thesis is right.
Meanwhile the headline version of this story — the one retail investors hear every day — is Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Twelve patients implanted. A $9 billion private valuation. Reports of a confidential filing toward an IPO.
And in January 2026, OpenAI led a $252 million funding round into Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup co-founded by Sam Altman, valuing the company at $850 million. Altman himself did not invest personal capital. The structure raised eyebrows in the financial press given the circular dynamic of OpenAI investing in a company Altman co-founded — but the substantive signal is that one of the most strategically positioned investors in artificial intelligence has decided brain-computer interfaces are worth a nine-figure check.
Retail will pile into Neuralink and Merge Labs when they go public. Fine. The valuations on those listings will already price in years of growth.
The trade I’m interested in is the one underneath the headlines. The supply chain that every brain-computer-interface company has to use — Neuralink, Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, Merge Labs, every academic lab pursuing the connectomics thesis. That supply chain is mostly public, mostly cheap, and mostly unwatched.
Below are 14 names organized into three buckets: two to start with, eight more for full exposure, and four private companies I’m watching to come public.
Why BCI Supply Chain Stocks Beat Buying Neuralink at IPO
There’s a pattern that shows up over and over in market history.
When a transformative technology is emerging, the first companies that capture investor attention are the consumer-facing brands. The visionary CEOs. The demos that go viral.
But the largest investment returns — the truly career-defining ones — usually come from the suppliers to those headline names.
The California Gold Rush made very few prospectors wealthy. But Levi Strauss — who supplied the miners with the durable goods they needed — became extraordinarily wealthy. The dot-com era is remembered for Pets.com and Webvan, but the companies that survived and compounded were Cisco, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems — the routers, the databases, the servers. The smartphone revolution is associated with Apple, but Taiwan Semiconductor and ASML have produced their own extraordinary returns making the components Apple depends on.
The brain-computer-interface revolution will follow the same pattern. Neuralink and Merge Labs are the headlines. The supply chain is where the picks-and-shovels live.
That’s the framework. Now the names.
Bucket 1: Top 2 Brain-Computer Interface Stocks to Buy Now
If you only buy two names from this thesis, buy these.
Butterfly Network (BFLY) — ~$500M market cap
This is my lead name. Butterfly makes a handheld, chip-based ultrasound device. In Q4 2025, the company reported revenue of $31.5 million — up 41% year-over-year — and achieved its first quarter of positive operating cash flow in company history. Net loss narrowed to $15.3 million from $18.1 million the prior year. Cash on the balance sheet sits at $150.5 million. Full-year 2026 revenue guidance is $117-121 million, implying 20-24% growth.
That’s the visible business. Real revenue, accelerating, with cash flow turning positive.
The optionality on top of it is what makes BFLY a lead position rather than just a small-cap medical device idea.
Butterfly’s ultrasound-on-chip technology is licensed into Forest Neurotech, a brain-computer interface research organization that’s part of the Convergent Research / Schmidt Futures Network. Forest is one of two leading non-invasive BCI efforts in the United States. The other is Sam Altman’s Merge Labs.
Here’s the part that connects the trade: both Forest and Merge are pursuing ultrasound-based brain interfaces, not electrode-based ones. And Mikhail Shapiro, the Caltech engineer whose lab pioneered this scientific approach, advises Forest Neurotech and is part of Merge Labs’ founding leadership.
In other words, the two best-funded non-invasive BCI efforts in the United States are both built on the same scientific foundation, and Butterfly’s chip is the supplier to one of them.
That’s a structural moat. The downside is bounded by a real, growing core business. The upside is a re-rating if either Forest or Merge produces a commercial milestone — and Butterfly’s chip becomes the recognized platform technology for ultrasound BCI.
Quantum-Si (QSI) — ~$194M market cap
The asymmetric bet. QSI is the only commercial single-molecule protein sequencer on the market. Connectomics research consistently identifies protein sequencing as a gating technology for any serious effort to digitally map a brain — and right now, Quantum-Si is the only U.S.-listed way to own it directly.
The catch: revenue is only $2.4 million. This is pre-commercial in the truest sense.
That’s why I treat QSI as a call option, not a core position. If the thesis plays out, the stock could compound by 5x or more. If it doesn’t — if protein sequencing follows a slower commercial adoption curve, or if a competing technology displaces it — the stock could halve.
Size accordingly. A small allocation is appropriate. Disclosure: I am personally long QSI at the time of publication.
Bucket 2: 8 More BCI Supply Chain Stocks for Full Exposure
The rest of the basket. A mix of small-caps and quiet compounders — that combination is intentional.
Hyperfine (HYPR) — Makes the only FDA-cleared portable brain MRI in the world. Their Swoop system brings brain scanning to the bedside. Recent international approvals are opening markets worth several hundred million dollars annually. Small-cap. Trades on news. The news is starting to come.
NVIDIA (NVDA) — Everyone owns NVIDIA for AI. Few people own it for the brain race. Synchron’s brain-interface decoder runs on NVIDIA Holoscan. Whichever consumer brain-interface wins, NVIDIA is the compute platform underneath. Not a pure-play. A confirmation that the broader thematic is real.
Micron Technology (MU) — The memory-wall trade. Over the last 30 years, computing power has roughly doubled every two years. Memory bandwidth has grown only about 1.6x in the same period. That gap is the real bottleneck for both AI workloads and brain emulation. Micron is the cleanest U.S.-listed pure-play on high-bandwidth memory. Cyclical, so timing matters. Buy on weakness.
Medtronic (MDT) — Medtronic has announced a distribution partnership with Precision Neuroscience, giving them exposure to the BCI market without having to build the technology themselves. The conservative, dividend-paying way to be in the trade.
Nautilus Biotechnology (NAUT) — The pair trade with QSI. Different scientific approach to protein sequencing, same underlying thesis. Recent academic platform wins are starting to validate the technology. If you own QSI and want to hedge picking the wrong horse, NAUT is the hedge. Treat the pair as one bet split across two tickers.
Bruker (BRKR) — ~$9B market cap — Super-resolution microscopy. The instruments that the labs doing serious brain-mapping research use every day. Picks-and-shovels in the most literal sense. Less binary than the micro-caps.
Thermo Fisher Scientific (TMO) — ~$200B market cap — One of only two companies in the world (with Zeiss) that makes the high-throughput electron microscopes every connectomics laboratory needs. A compounder. The slow, patient way to own the trend without the volatility.
Broadcom (AVGO) — Custom AI silicon and networking chips for Google, Meta, and Amazon. The wiring side of the memory-wall thesis. Not a brain-interface story directly, but the infrastructure every brain-AI effort ultimately runs on. Same logic as NVIDIA — if you already own it, you’re already in.
Bucket 3: 4 Private BCI Companies to Watch Pre-IPO
These cannot be bought publicly. Yet.
But when any one of them files an S-1 with the SEC, every public name above is likely to re-rate within days. Have cash ready.
Neuralink — ~$9B valuation. The name everyone knows. Musk’s company. $650 million Series E in June 2025 at a $9 billion valuation. Twelve patients implanted to date. FDA Breakthrough Device designation for both speech and vision restoration.
Synchron — Pre-IPO. A less-invasive brain interface, inserted through the jugular vein rather than requiring open-brain surgery. $200 million Series D in November 2025 led by Double Point Ventures, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Khosla Ventures, ARCH Ventures, and the Qatar Investment Authority. Total funding now $345 million. Stentrode platform implanted in 10 patients to date. Already integrated with Apple’s BCI human interface device protocol and NVIDIA Holoscan. Arguably the safer IPO than Neuralink because the surgery is materially simpler.
Precision Neuroscience — Pre-IPO. A surface-of-brain interface that sits on the brain rather than penetrating it. Co-founded by a former Neuralink employee. Has received FDA designations for its wireless BCI work. Signed a distribution partnership with Medtronic, which is why Medtronic is in the basket above.
Merge Labs — Pre-IPO. Co-founded by Sam Altman in 2025, with the company emerging from stealth in January 2026 with $252 million in funding led by OpenAI at an $850 million valuation. Pursuing non-invasive ultrasound-based BCI rather than implants. Mikhail Shapiro of Caltech is part of the founding leadership. The same scientific foundation as Forest Neurotech. Watch the timeline — early-stage today, but Altman’s involvement guarantees attention when commercialization milestones arrive.
The Catalysts That Will Move BCI Stocks
You don’t need to read every neuroscience press release. Watch three things.
Any S-1 filing from Neuralink, Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, or Merge Labs. This is the single biggest catalyst for the entire basket. The first one to file moves every public name within days.
Hyperscaler capex guidance, especially related to specialty silicon. If Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta confirm continued spending on custom AI silicon, that flows directly to NVDA, AVGO, and MU.
Earnings prints from BFLY, QSI, NAUT, and HYPR. These are the small-caps where business execution matters most. Watch for: Butterfly’s gross margin trajectory and any new partnership announcements, Quantum-Si’s revenue growth, Nautilus’s customer wins, Hyperfine’s India traction.
The Bottom Line on Brain-Computer Interface Stocks
Most investors will read about Neuralink for the first time when CNBC runs a banner headline reading “Neuralink Files for IPO.” By that point, the supply-chain stocks above will have already re-rated.
The investors who do best with thematic trades like this one are the ones who do the work before the headline, not after.
Read the underlying research — connectomics work is publicly available and accelerating fast. Understand the supply chain — the 14 names above aren’t a screen, they’re a map of dependencies. Watch the catalysts. The first S-1 from any of the four private companies will move this basket.
The brain race is happening. The supply chain is already public. The question for any investor is whether you want to be early — or late.
To stay ahead of moves like this as they develop, watch Masters in Trading LIVE every market day at 11 a.m. Eastern, where real-time trade setups, sector shifts, and key signals driving money across the market are broken down.
Editor’s Note: Here’s what most investors don’t understand: The biggest gains don’t come from being in “the market.” They come from being in the right sectors at the right time. For 46 years, Louis Navellier has used a quantitative grading system to track where institutional billions flow before anyone else sees it. The same system wealthy firms paid $24,000 per year for me to evaluate stocks with. Companies like Palantir at $13 (before it hit $186). Applovin at $38 (before it reached $622). Carvana at $24 (before $340). His system detected institutional accumulation months before these stocks exploded. Right now, Navellier’s grades are changing across entire sectors — patterns he’s only seen twice before. See which sectors are lighting up with institutional buying in his presentation here.
