Sabi raises $50 million seed round for an EEG baseball cap that sends prompts to AI
The start-up, backed by Khosla Ventures and Accel, says sensors hidden in an ordinary-looking cap can pick up brain signals through hair. It has not published performance data.
Sabi, a start-up building a non-invasive brain-computer interface into a baseball cap, announced on October 9 that it has raised a $50 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures. Accel, Initialized Capital, DST Global, Collaborative Fund, Ascend and former OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil also invested. That is an unusually large first round for a consumer neurotech company.
How it is meant to work
The cap is designed to look like normal headwear. According to the company, it hides small EEG sensors, each 1 to 5 millimeters across, that can pick up electrical brain signals through hair without gel and without touching the scalp, across gaps of up to 5 millimeters. A custom chip amplifies the signals, and the cap connects wirelessly to a phone or computer.
Software then tries to turn those signals into text or commands. Sabi says its AI model was trained on more than 100,000 hours of labeled non-invasive brain recordings, and that the goal is to let a wearer turn intentionally imagined speech into text, send prompts to an AI assistant, or confirm actions the system predicts on screen. The company was founded by chief executive Rahul Chhabra and chief technology officer Atmadeep Banerjee.
The money will go toward collecting more data, finishing the chip, building early devices and hiring. Sabi plans to show an early prototype at CES 2027 in Las Vegas and has not given a sale date or price.
Why it matters
- Investor interest is moving to non-invasive devices. The round follows large raises over the past year by Merge Labs, Neurable and others that aim to reach consumers without surgery.
- The claims are unproven. Signals recorded through the skull and hair are far weaker and noisier than those from implants, and decoding imagined speech from EEG remains a hard research problem. Sabi’s announcement includes no accuracy or speed figures and no peer-reviewed results, and its chip benchmarks are internal.
- Privacy questions will follow. An always-worn cap that records brain activity would collect neural data on a scale that current laws in most places do not specifically address.
Learn more: EEG · Dry electrodes · Neural decoding · Neural data