Sabi raises $50M seed led by Khosla for brain-reading cap

Vinod Khosla led a $50 million seed round in Sabi, a Palo Alto company building a baseball cap that converts a wearer's internal thoughts into text prompts for AI assistants, Forbes reported. The investment values the company at $600 million. Accel, DST Global, Initialized Capital and former OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil also backed it.

Sabi's prototype is lined with up to 100,000 non-contact chip-scale EEG sensors, each one to five millimeters across. A 'brain foundational model,' trained on 100,000 hours of labelled neural data, decodes what the wearer is thinking and sends it as a prompt to an AI system. CEO Rahul Chhabra, who co-founded the company with CTO Atmadeep Banerjee (co-first author of the MindEye NeurIPS 2023 paper on decoding viewed images from non-invasive brain recordings), told Forbes Sabi aims to ship a brain-reading beanie by the end of 2026, with a baseball-cap form factor to follow. Initial typing-speed target: about 30 words per minute.

The pitch rests on skipping surgery entirely. 'The grandest and most core application of brain-computer interface is to communicate directly with the computer with thoughts,' Khosla said, in comments the reporting pairs with his view that non-invasive wearables are the only way to popularize brain-computer interface technology among the general public.

The specifics are the company's claim, not an independent benchmark: the coverage does not publish a measured decoding accuracy, a per-user calibration time, or a price. Khosla sits at No. 1 on the 2026 Midas List and was the first institutional investor into OpenAI, which is part of why a seed round priced at a $600 million markup draws attention. It is also the second AI input-device story on our radar this week, after Natura's $99 interface ring for routing finger-presses to AI agents.