Asia-focused venture capital firm Gobi Partners has invested in Cortical Labs, a biotechnology company developing computing systems that combine living human neurons with silicon hardware.

The funding round was led by Horizon Ventures and 3C, with participation from Tom Oxley, founder of U.S.-based brain-computer interface company Synchron. The investment was made through Malaysia-based Gobi Partners’ Dana Impak Ventures fund, backed by Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional. The move supports efforts to expand Malaysia’s capabilities in semiconductor engineering and advanced manufacturing.

Cortical Labs has established engineering and manufacturing operations in Malaysia, operating from SIDEC’s IC Design Park in Puchong. The company plans to expand into chip design to integrate its biological systems with custom semiconductor components.

Cortical Labs develops laboratory-grown human neurons cultured on electrode arrays and connected to silicon systems. Its CL1 platform is described as the world’s first commercially available, code-deployable biological computer, enabling researchers to conduct real-time experiments on living neural networks.

As artificial intelligence systems require increasing computing power and energy, Cortical Labs is exploring biological neural networks as an alternative or complementary computing approach. The technology is also being applied in central nervous system drug discovery research, allowing scientists to observe how neural tissue responds to pharmaceutical compounds.

Cortical Labs’ expansion in Malaysia is expected to create roles in neuroscience, chip design, and computational biology, contributing to the country’s growing deep-technology sector.

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