Investing in Neuralink: what to know before its IPO

Investing in Neuralink is a dream for many savers: Elon Musk's start-up is developing brain implants that already allow paralyzed people to control a computer with their thoughts. Yet there is no Neuralink stock listed on an exchange. The company remains a private company, owned by Elon Musk, its employees and venture capital funds, and it is now the main company in the Musk ecosystem still closed to the markets.

This page reviews what you need to know before investing in Neuralink: its technology, the progress of its clinical trials, the evolution of its valuation, the pre-IPO offers made to individuals, the crypto tokens that use its name with no link to it, and the risks specific to this type of investment. We will also look at how Fundora makes it possible to gain exposure, ahead of an IPO, to unlisted deep tech and healthcare companies.

Neuralink, Elon Musk's neurotechnology company

Founded in 2016 in San Francisco by Elon Musk and eight researchers and engineers, Neuralink designs a brain-machine interface, that is, a device able to read the activity of neurons and translate it into commands for a computer or a phone. The company is based in Fremont, California. Elon Musk is its majority shareholder, and Jared Birchall, who also runs his family office, is its official executive. Only two of the eight co-founders were still there in 2022.

Its technology rests on three elements:

• The Telepathy implant, the size of a coin, which records brain signals through 1,024 electrodes spread over 64 threads thinner than a hair, and transmits them wirelessly;
• The surgical robot, designed to insert these flexible threads with precision, without damaging the blood vessels of the cortex;
• The applications, which turn neural signals into cursor movements, text input or control of a robotic arm.

The starting goal is medical: giving autonomy back to people with paralysis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or blindness. Neuralink is also developing Blindsight, a visual cortex implant meant to restore a form of vision in blind people, which received “Breakthrough Device” status from the FDA, the US health authority, in September 2024. In the longer term, Elon Musk talks about a “symbiosis with artificial intelligence”, a discourse that raises reservations in the scientific community.

Sources: Wikipédia, “Neuralink”, fr.wikipedia.org; Wikipedia, “Neuralink”, en.wikipedia.org.

Where do Neuralink's clinical trials stand?

After a first refusal in 2022, linked in particular to the safety of the lithium battery and the risk of the threads migrating in the brain, the FDA authorized Neuralink to test its implant in humans in May 2023. The first patient, Noland Arbaugh, who became quadriplegic after a diving accident, was implanted in January 2024. A few weeks later, he was playing chess by moving the cursor with his thoughts. Some of the threads in his implant then retracted, which reduced his performance and led Neuralink to modify its procedure.

The trials have since extended to Canada, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. In January 2026, Neuralink had 21 participants worldwide, up from 12 in September 2025, and claimed no serious adverse event linked to the device. The company announced large-scale production of its implants in 2026, as well as a simplified surgical procedure: at the end of June 2026, it managed to insert its implant without cutting the dura mater, the membrane that protects the brain. The first human trials of Blindsight are recruiting.

These advances remain those of a company at the clinical stage. The implant is not approved for sale in any country, and Neuralink generates no commercial revenue to date. It is not alone in this market: Synchron, whose implant goes through the blood vessels, Paradromics, Precision Neuroscience, founded by a former Neuralink co-founder, and Blackrock Neurotech are developing competing technologies.

Sources: Boursorama with Reuters, “Neuralink, Elon Musk's company, announces 21 trial participants” (January 2026), www.boursorama.com; Les Echos, “Neuralink, Musk's start-up, will be able to test its brain implants on humans” (May 2023), www.lesechos.fr; Wikipédia, “Neuralink” (Human application projects section), fr.wikipedia.org.

Is Neuralink listed on a stock exchange?

No. Neuralink is not listed on any stock exchange: there is no Neuralink share, no associated ticker, and no broker lets you buy its shares. Neuralink stock is therefore eligible neither for the PEA nor for a securities account. No IPO has been announced to date.

The situation has changed for the rest of the Musk ecosystem. Tesla has been listed since 2010. SpaceX, which absorbed the artificial intelligence company xAI and the X network in February 2026, joined the Nasdaq on June 12, 2026. Neuralink and The Boring Company are the two major Elon Musk companies that remain private. Our pages on how to invest in SpaceX and invest in xAI detail what you buy on the stock market with the SPCX share.

Some articles present Tesla as a way to gain exposure to Neuralink. This is inaccurate: Tesla has no known stake in Neuralink, and the two companies mainly share a founder. Buying a Tesla share means investing in an automotive and energy company, not in brain implants.

Neuralink's valuation: from the Series C to $9 billion

Neuralink has financed its research through successive funding rounds with venture capital funds, for a total of more than $1.3 billion:

• Until 2019: $158 million raised, of which $100 million came from Elon Musk himself;
• July 2021: Series C of $205 million, led by Vy Capital, with notably GV (Google Ventures), Founders Fund and Valor Equity Partners;
• August 2023: Series D of $280 million, led by Founders Fund, supplemented by $43 million a few months later;
• June 2025: Series E of $650 million, with ARK Invest, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital or Lightspeed, at a valuation of about $9 billion before the round.

Since then, no new public round has set a price. Estimates published in 2026 by data platforms on the secondary market range from under $10 billion to over $50 billion, with no public reference transaction. These gaps show how hard it is to establish the value of an unlisted company with no revenue, and why the price paid to invest in Neuralink varies so much depending on the intermediary.

Pre-IPO offers and the secondary market: what to check

With no listed share, several intermediaries offer individuals the chance to invest in Neuralink before its IPO, promising to let them “become a shareholder” of the start-up. These offers take two main forms:

• US secondary market platforms, such as Forge or EquityZen, where employees and historical investors resell their shares. In practice they are reserved for accredited investors as defined by US regulations, and volumes on Neuralink are limited there.
• Tokenized offers, available from a few hundred dollars. In summer 2026, for example, a tokenized real estate platform opened a Neuralink allocation from $250, at a valuation of $44 billion that it itself describes as an internal estimate, with up to 5% entry fees and up to 20% performance commission. The investor holds a token issued by a dedicated company, which in turn invests in a fund, itself exposed to Neuralink shares.

Before subscribing to this type of offer, several points deserve checking: the exact nature of what you hold (a share, a fund unit or a token), proof that the Neuralink shares were actually acquired, the entry valuation compared with the latest funding round, the total level of fees, the exit conditions, and the regulatory status of the intermediary in France. If in doubt, the blacklists published by the AMF make it possible to spot unauthorized players.

Neuralink token: no link with the company

When looking to buy Neuralink, you often come across crypto platform pages offering a token called Neuralink (NLINK or NEURALINK). These tokens, issued notably on the BNB Smart Chain, have no link with Elon Musk's company. They are not listed on the main centralized exchanges, trade for a fraction of a cent with volumes of a few thousand dollars a day at most, and give no right over Neuralink's shares, results or technology.

Using the name of a famous company is a common way to attract buyers to highly speculative crypto-assets. The same phenomenon exists around xAI, with several “XAI” tokens unrelated to the company. Tokens presented as Neuralink “tokenized shares”, such as PreStocks' NEURAL token, are also listed on crypto sites: they are not issued by Neuralink and do not confer shareholder status.

Sources: Coinbase, “Neuralink asset price”, www.coinbase.com; Binance, “Buy Neuralink (NLINK)”, www.binance.com.

Other ways to gain exposure to the Neuralink universe

With no Neuralink share, several routes are often cited to get close to it. None gives direct exposure to the company:

• Alphabet. GV, the venture capital fund of Google's parent company, took part in Neuralink's Series C in 2021. At the scale of Alphabet, the weight of this stake is negligible.
• Nvidia and the major AI suppliers. These stocks have no known capital link with Neuralink: they give exposure to the artificial intelligence sector, not to brain implants.
• Tesla. As seen above, Tesla has no known stake in Neuralink.
• Thematic ETFs dedicated to artificial intelligence, robotics or medical technologies, available in a securities account and, for some, in a PEA. They do not hold Neuralink, which is not listed, but listed companies from the same universe.
• Unlisted assets, through venture capital funds that invest in deep tech and healthcare before companies go public. It is the only route that gives exposure to start-ups comparable to Neuralink at the time when most of their value is created.

The risks to know before investing in Neuralink

Gaining exposure to Neuralink, directly or through a pre-IPO offer, involves specific risks that you should know about:

• Risk of capital loss. Neuralink has no revenue and depends on successive funding rounds: an unlisted valuation can fall, and the investment can be lost in whole or in part.
• Clinical and regulatory risk. Commercializing the implant requires FDA approval and then approval from the authorities of other countries. An incident during the trials, such as the thread retraction seen in the first patient, can delay the timeline.
• Liquidity risk. Shares of an unlisted company cannot be resold at any time: you have to wait for an IPO, a buyout or a secondary transaction.
• Valuation risk. Pre-IPO offers available to individuals often use a valuation far above the latest funding round, which reduces the potential gain accordingly.
• Concentration risk. Betting on a single company exposes all of the invested capital to its success.
• Risk linked to structures and fake assets. Some structures guarantee neither the actual holding of the shares nor the transparency of fees, and namesake tokens give no exposure to the company.
• Reputational risk. Neuralink has been the subject of controversies over its animal experiments and the transparency of its trials, which can weigh on its reputation.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Investing in tomorrow's deep tech and healthcare with Fundora

Neuralink's trajectory illustrates a reality of private equity: most of the value creation of a breakthrough company happens during its private phase, and it is the venture capital funds present from the first rounds that benefit from it on the best terms. For an individual, the challenge is therefore not just to invest in Neuralink or another famous name, but to access these funds, at the right price and in a diversified way.

Fundora allows individual investors to invest in unlisted assets, ahead of a possible IPO, in diversified portfolios of growing companies, just as when you choose to invest in startups with high potential or to invest in AI. The platform relies on a structure combining an FPCI (Fonds Professionnel de Capital Investissement, a professional private equity fund) and an SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle), which pool the subscriptions of several individual investors within a single structure investing directly in the target funds. This mechanism significantly lowers the entry threshold compared with a direct subscription, where institutional minimum tickets usually range between €200,000 and €1 million. The minimum access amount varies according to the strategy open for subscription at the time of investment.

Fundora thus identifies and offers strategies selected from the global top 25% of funds, with actual management carried out by Kyoseil Asset Management under the mandate, a portfolio management company approved by the AMF under number GP-99040. Strategies already offered on the platform include, for example, Deep Scale Growth, a growth equity strategy, or Redwood Venture, oriented toward Silicon Valley venture capital. They illustrate Fundora's ability to cover deep tech before the companies that make it up go public.

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