Neurotech & BCI
Forest is a nonprofit research instrument, NOT an equity — the tradeable BCI bet it incubated walked out the door as Merge Labs (Altman/OpenAI, $850M); track Forest as the science-de-risking front-end, position via Merge or Butterfly (BFLY), never Forest itself.
Research
The verdict
Forest is a nonprofit research instrument, NOT an equity — the tradeable BCI bet it incubated walked out the door as Merge Labs (Altman/OpenAI, $850M); track Forest as the science-de-risking front-end, position via Merge or Butterfly (BFLY), never Forest itself.
What it is — and the category error to avoid. Forest Neurotech is a nonprofit Focused Research Organization (FRO) operating under Convergent Research (the FRO incubator founded 2021 by Adam Marblestone and Anastasia Gamick; ~10 FROs created to date). FROs are "startups for science" — fixed-term, mid-scale engineering pushes that build tools other scientists use, explicitly NOT companies pursuing a P&L or an exit. This is the single most important framing in the dossier: Forest is structurally untradeable. There is no cap table to buy into, no path to a ticker, no equity.
The product. Forest's flagship is Forest 1 — described by Forest and by funder ARIA as a minimally invasive, whole-brain computer interface that uses ultrasound (not electrodes) to both measure (functional ultrasound imaging, fUSI) and modulate (focused ultrasound, FUS) brain-wide activity. The hardware is a research-grade ultrasound scanner "smaller than a standard key fob," powered by Butterfly Network's Ultrasound-on-Chip™. It is designed to sit implanted flush with the dura beneath an acoustically transparent cranial window — minimally invasive relative to penetrating electrode arrays, but still a surgical implant (it is not a wearable-on-skin device, despite some loose press framing).
Customers / go-to-market. Forest's stated model is license the platform to academic and industry research organizations — and it has said explicitly: "Within the lifetime of our nonprofit research organization, we don't have plans to submit to the FDA". So the "customer" is the research community, not patients or payers. The nearest thing to a commercial counterparty is its supplier, Butterfly Network (see Lens 2), and its funder/validator, ARIA + the NHS (see Lens 5/10).
Contract structure / key terms. The economically concrete relationship is the Butterfly co-development agreement (Lens 2): a 5-year deal under which Forest pays Butterfly up to $20M (licensing + chip purchases + services + milestones), $3.5M already paid, plus per-unit revenue to Butterfly on every device sold. Note the direction of cash: Forest is a payer, not a revenue generator.
Bottom line (Lens 1). Forest is a philanthropically-funded research instrument whose job is to de-risk the ultrasound-BCI modality and prove it in humans. Its commercial value does not accrue to "Forest" — it accrues to whoever productizes the validated modality. As of Jan 2026, that party has a name: Merge Labs (Lens 9, Lens 11).
Map of the actual named entities along Forest's chain:
| Stage | Named entity | Role / dependency |
|---|---|---|
| Core chip (upstream, single-source) | Butterfly Network (NYSE: BFLY) | Supplies the Ultrasound-on-Chip™ (CMOS capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer, "iQ"-lineage). 5-yr co-dev deal; Forest pays Butterfly ≤$20M + per-unit. Single-source chokepoint — Forest 1's sensing front-end is Butterfly silicon. |
| Chip fab (upstream of Butterfly) | Semiconductor foundry (CMOS) | Butterfly's ultrasound-on-chip is a CMOS/MEMS part; fab is one layer further upstream (Butterfly has historically used TSMC-class CMOS foundries). |
| Scientific IP origin | Caltech (Andersen Lab; Mikhail Shapiro lab) | Forest's founding science (fUSI decoding, acoustically transparent cranial window) was developed at Caltech; founders are Caltech alumni/affiliates (Lens 9). |
| The organization | Forest Neurotech (FRO) | Integrates chip + cranial-window + decoding software into Forest 1. |
| Incubator / parent | Convergent Research | FRO incubator; provides the nonprofit operating structure. |
| Funders (the "demand" side) | ARIA (£6.5M for the NHS trial; part of a £69M / 4-yr Precision Neurotechnologies programme), Eric Schmidt ($14M, 2024), James Fickel, Griffin Catalyst (Ken Griffin), Riley & Susan Bechtel Foundation | Philanthropic + government capital, not equity investors. |
| Clinical delivery (downstream) | Barking, Havering & Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust; University of Plymouth; CRO PHARMExcel | Run the first-in-human Forest 1 trial in the UK. |
| Successor / IP fork (the live question) | Merge Labs | Spun out of Forest Jan 2026 with shared founders; "how IP, responsibilities, and personnel are divided between them has not been clarified publicly". This is the most important unresolved chain dependency — see Lens 13. |
Chokepoints. (1) Butterfly is single-source for the sensing chip — the entire device pipeline depends on one NYSE-listed supplier with its own going-concern history. (2) The IP boundary with Merge Labs is undefined — if the valuable IP migrated to Merge, Forest is left holding a research mandate without the crown jewels. Names here, not generic: the chain is Caltech → (Butterfly silicon) → Forest → NHS, with Merge Labs as a fork off the founder node.
Where the edge is real:
Where the "moat" is weak or misframed:
Bargaining power. Low over Butterfly (single-source, Forest pays). Moderate over the research-tool "market" (novel capability, few substitutes for deep+whole-brain access). None in the commercial sense — it's a nonprofit.
segments.csv is empty (header row only). Forest has no revenue segments — it is a pre-revenue nonprofit. There is nothing to break out by product or geography in the operating sense. The only meaningful "segmentation" is by funding source and program, reconstructed web-only:
| "Segment" (funding/program) | Amount | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Philanthropic grant (Schmidt-led) | $14M | Largest single private grant; Schmidt + Fickel + Griffin Catalyst + Bechtel | |
| ARIA / NHS Forest 1 trial | £6.5M (~$8M) | Within ARIA's £69M Precision Neurotechnologies programme | |
| Butterfly co-dev (outflow) | up to $20M payable by Forest | A cost line, not revenue; $3.5M paid |
Geography: US-incorporated nonprofit; flagship clinical activity in the UK (NHS) — a deliberate regulatory-arbitrage choice (UK first-in-human is faster than a US IDE; reinforced by Forest's stated no-FDA posture). Trend: the funding base is shifting from US philanthropy (2024) to UK government-clinical (2025), while the commercial center of gravity has shifted entirely out of Forest into Merge Labs (2026).
No financial tape exists. Forest has no earnings, no consensus, no public stock, no transcripts. Phase B is therefore re-pointed per the
+privateoverlay to funding/valuation trajectory, traction, and milestone catalysts, with the brutal caveat that the company is pre-revenue and unaudited.
Forest's own trajectory:
The valuation that actually matters is its successor's. Merge Labs (the Forest spinout) raised a ~$252M seed at an ~$850M valuation in Jan 2026, OpenAI writing the largest check. That $850M is the closest market-clearing price for "the Forest ultrasound-BCI thesis," but it is Merge's mark, not Forest's.
Burn / runway signal. Forest is consuming philanthropic + grant capital (~$22M+ disclosed inflows 2024–25) against a ≤$20M multi-year Butterfly obligation and a clinical trial. As an FRO it runs on a fixed-term budget, not perpetual fundraising — the risk is mandate completion, not insolvency. Unaudited per public sources.
No earnings calls exist. Substitute: founder/CEO public commentary trend.
Forest's "syndicate" is philanthropic, not a venture cap table: Eric Schmidt, James Fickel, Griffin Catalyst (Ken Griffin), Riley & Susan Bechtel Foundation, ARIA (UK gov). No tier-1 VC, no crossover fund — because there is no equity to own. The IPO-proximity tells the +private overlay looks for (Fidelity/T. Rowe/Coatue entries) are structurally absent and always will be for Forest itself.
The comp table that matters — the ultrasound-BCI thesis vs. the electrode field:
| Company | Modality | Last valuation | As-of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Merge Labs (Forest's successor) | Ultrasound + molecular, non-implant | ~$850M (seed, $252M) | Jan 2026 | |
| Neuralink | Penetrating electrode threads + surgical robot | ~$9.6B (then $650M Series E Apr 2026; ~$1.85B total raised) | Apr 2026 | |
| Synchron | Endovascular Stentrode (via blood vessel) | ~$1B ($200M raise) | Nov 2025 | |
| Precision Neuroscience | Surface micro-electrode array | ~$170M total raised (Series C $117M Dec 2024) | Nov 2025 | |
| Paradromics | High-bandwidth penetrating array | n/a this pass | — | — |
| Forest Neurotech | Ultrasound (implanted, dura-flush) | n/a — nonprofit, no equity valuation | — |
TAM frame: Grand View / industry estimates put the BCI market at $8–12B by 2030. Read this table the right way: the modality Forest pioneered is now being valued by the market at $850M (Merge) against a field leader at ~$9.6B (Neuralink) — i.e., ultrasound is the early-stage, highest-uncertainty entrant, priced ~11x below the leader.
No stock, so the "what moves the value of this thesis" timeline:
Pattern read: every Forest catalyst de-risks the modality (which benefits Merge and Butterfly), not Forest's own balance sheet — because Forest captures no equity upside. The market "reacts" by funding the for-profit successor, not the nonprofit.
Sumner Norman — Co-founder & CEO. PhD in brain-machine interfaces / human-robot interaction; postdoctoral fellow in Richard Andersen's lab at Caltech, where he co-first-authored the foundational ultrasonic-BCI work (decoding movement intentions from fUSI in non-human primates). Co-founded Forest in 2023 on that research. Track record: primarily scientific/translational — genuine peer-reviewed breakthroughs, less a record of building/scaling an organization. Archetype: scientist-founder. Skin in the game: n/a in equity terms at Forest (nonprofit); now a co-founder of for-profit Merge Labs.
Tyson Aflalo — Co-founder. Caltech (Andersen lab) neuroscientist; co-founder of Forest and also a co-founder of Merge Labs.
Mikhail Shapiro — scientific anchor. Caltech professor; pioneer of acoustic biomolecules / ultrasound neuromodulation; advisor/collaborator to Forest and a named co-founder of Merge Labs. His public quote — "Using blood flow to image neural activity with functional ultrasound works really well" — is also the source of the bear case (it's blood flow, not spikes).
William Biederman — CTO. Cited as Forest's CTO; emphasizes stimulation+recording "with submillimeter accuracy".
Convergent Research / Adam Marblestone — the FRO parent's CEO; sets the nonprofit operating model.
Capital-allocation read. As a nonprofit, "capital allocation" = grant deployment toward a fixed scientific milestone (human Forest 1 data). No buybacks/M&A frame applies. The defining capital-allocation event is the Merge Labs spinout — value created inside a philanthropically-funded nonprofit became the seed for an $850M for-profit owned by (some of) the same founders + Altman + OpenAI. Whether that was a clean, arms-length licensing of Forest IP to Merge — or value leaving the nonprofit on favorable terms — is the governance question (Lens 10/13); it is "not been clarified publicly".
Red flags (people). No fraud signals. The flag is structural conflict: the same individuals run a donor-funded nonprofit and a for-profit pursuing the same modality, with OpenAI (Altman's other company) as lead investor. Donor capital de-risking a privately-owned for-profit is a real reputational/governance risk even if entirely above board.
Accounting forensics: n/a — no audited financials exist. As a US nonprofit, Forest would file an IRS Form 990 (not reviewed this pass — flag as an open item; a 990 would show comp, grants, and the Merge-related transactions and is the single highest-value document to pull next). Revenue recognition / SBC / goodwill lenses don't apply to a pre-revenue nonprofit.
Regulatory findings:
total_sec_findings: 0.Conclusion: No material regulatory or legal findings — verified via SEC EDGAR EFTS (LR, AAER → 0), web search (no hits), and confirmation of no FDA submission, as of 2026-06-23. The only genuine "forensic" question is the governance of the Forest→Merge value transfer (Lens 9/13), which is a transparency gap, not a known violation.
No EPS projection — Forest is a pre-revenue nonprofit. No Brier forecast logged (per
--watchlistrules and the SKILL's no-forecast-on-watchlist guidance). The+privateLens 11 asks: what unlocks a tradeable security, and when? For Forest the answer is stark.
Forest itself: path-to-tradeable ≈ none. As a nonprofit FRO with no equity, Forest will never IPO and cannot be bought as a security. It is absent from research/private-watch.json for exactly this reason — there is no IPO readiness to score. The correct entry in that ledger, if added, would be ipo_readiness: n/a — nonprofit; tradeable exposure is via Merge Labs (private) or Butterfly (BFLY, public).
The tradeable exposures the thesis actually creates:
Milestones that unlock value (for Merge, and indirectly BFLY):
Bull case (the thesis at its strongest). Ultrasound is the right long-term modality and Forest's science proves it: whole-brain + deep reach + read-and-write in one device + dramatically less invasive than penetrating electrodes, with peer-reviewed primate and human-feasibility data and a manufacturable Butterfly chip. The market agrees enough to fund the successor (Merge) at $850M with OpenAI as lead. If fUSI's latency problem is engineered down and the NHS trial shows a real mood/motivation effect, ultrasound leapfrogs the surgical-electrode field on the dimension patients care about most — not needing brain surgery. For Forest's mission, the bull case is "it works, gets licensed broadly, and seeds a whole sub-industry" — which is arguably already happening.
Bear case (2–3 things that permanently impair the THESIS — Forest has no business to impair).
Pre-mortem (18 months out, the thesis broke — what happened?). The NHS Forest 1 trial reads out null or ambiguous on mood/motivation; or it surfaces a safety/imaging-stability problem under the dura; meanwhile the hemodynamic-latency wall proves real in closed-loop human use, capping ultrasound to niche monitoring. Merge's $850M mark looks rich, its next round is flat or down, and the "ultrasound leapfrogs electrodes" narrative deflates while Synchron/Neuralink ship FDA-track products.
Are multiples too high? For Forest, n/a (no equity). For the thesis, Merge's $850M seed is the stretched number — Neuralink-stage capital on a pre-clinical-validation modality.
Contrarian view (what the market refuses to see). The market is treating "Forest Neurotech" as a BCI company to track for a position. It is not — it is a nonprofit research subroutine whose entire economic output was designed to be given away and has already been forked into Merge Labs. The contrarian, correct move: stop trying to own Forest; track it as a free, high-quality science-de-risking signal, and take the position (if any) in Butterfly today or Merge later.
Dismantling any "go long Forest / the ultrasound-BCI thesis" case:
The safest, most surgically scalable path into the brain and the only BCI Apple made a native input — but it bet the company on "good enough" 16-electrode bandwidth, and its own third-gen "whole-brain" pivot is a confession that the moat it is famous for may be the ceiling it has to escape.
A first-mover NGPS tools story whose commercial engine is going backwards (revenue −20% in FY25, −69% in Q1'26 to $258K) while it bets the company on Proteus by end-2026; ~$190M cash funds the bet, but a 69%-Rothberg-controlled sub-$1 microcap with collapsing instrument demand is a binary option, not an investment — WATCHING until Proteus ships and consumable pull-through proves real.
The only FDA-cleared, commercially-shipping cortical BCI — but it is selling a 30-day surgical-monitoring tool, not the chronic implant the $500M valuation is priced on; Medtronic is the real tell, IP overhang from Rapoport's Neuralink past is the real risk.