Gobi Partners Backs Cortical Labs to Advance the Next Frontier of Biological Intelligence

Kuala Lumpur / Melbourne, 4 March 2026 – Gobi Partners has invested in Cortical Labs, a Melbourne-based deep technology company pioneering Biological Intelligence. The current round is led by global investors Horizon Ventures and 3C, with participation from Tom Oxley, founder of Synchron, a New York-based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) company.

The investment is made through the Gobi Dana Impak Ventures (GDIV) fund backed by Khazanah Nasional’s Dana Impak. It aligns with Khazanah’s strategy in Advancing Malaysia to strengthen Malaysia’s semiconductor and advanced manufacturing ecosystems by deepening Malaysia’s economic complexity. By locating Cortical Labs’ engineering and manufacturing facilities in Malaysia, the investment strengthens national capacity in deep technology across neuroscience, semiconductor engineering, and artificial intelligence. It supports the creation of high-value technical roles and positions Malaysia within an emerging global supply chain for advanced computing systems.

Dr. Hon Weng Chong, Founder and CEO,Cortical Labs said, “Just as the world has woken up to the economic benefits ofArtificial Intelligence, we are now hitting the wall with energy and data efficiency. The enormous environmental costs associated with scaling the approaches to emulate what nature has perfected over millions of years of evolution is alarming.

This funding supports our continued efforts to accelerate product innovation, deepen the market presence and partnerships to bring biological intelligence from the lab into real-world applications. Our focus now is to scale our platform responsibly and accelerate adoption of commercial systems that can learn and adapt more like humans.”

Cortical Labs develops systems that integrate living human neurons with silicon hardware. This approach represents a fundamentally different computing paradigm from conventional silicon-basedAI, one that leverages the adaptive, energy-efficient properties of biological neural networks. As AI models become increasingly compute and energy intensive,Biological Intelligence offers a complementary pathway for studying learning, adaptation, and decision-making using real biological systems rather than purely mathematical abstractions.

“Biological Intelligence represents a paradigm shift in how computation is evolving,” said Thomas G. Tsao, co-founder and chair of Gobi Partners. “These systems are developed to compete with silicon-based AI in tasks that require continuous learning, data, and energy-efficient intelligence, including robotics and cybersecurity.Malaysia has the engineering depth and manufacturing capability needed to playa meaningful role in this next era of computing.”

The same platform can also be used for central nervous system drug discovery, where the CL1 enables researchers to observe how living neural networks functionally respond to compounds.

Engineering and Talent Base in Malaysia

Cortical Labs has established Malaysia as its engineering and manufacturing hub, drawing on the country’s strengths in semiconductor precision manufacturing, embedded systems, and hardware testing.The company operates from SIDEC’s IC Design Park in Puchong and plans to expand into in-house chip design, integrating biological computation with custom ASICs.

The company’s growth in Malaysia will support the development of technical roles across neuroscience, chip design, and computational biology, strengthening national deep-tech capability and expanding access to future-proof industries.

Cortical Labs - Pioneering Biological Intelligence

At the core of Cortical Labs’ platform isCL1, the world’s first commercially available, code-deployable biological computer. CL1 combines lab-grown human neurons cultured on high-density electrode arrays with a fully integrated life-support system that maintains cell viability over extended periods.

Already in use by academic and commercial institutions, Cortical Labs’ CL1 platform enables real-time experiments with human-derived neural systems for research areas including drug discovery and disease modeling.

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About Cortical Labs

Cortical Labs is a Singaporean biological computing startup that merges live human neurons with computing systems to revolutionise computing. Cortical Labs combines synthetic biology with computing devices to develop a class of AI, known as “Synthetic BiologicalIntelligence” (SBI). Cortical Labs grows clusters of lab-cultivated neurons from human stem cells, which are then hooked to hard silicon to create the CL1,a biological computer that runs a software known as a Biological IntelligenceOperating System (biOS).