Sabi announced on October 9 that it has raised a $50 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures to build a non-invasive brain-AI interface designed for everyday wear, the company said in a statement. Accel, Initialized Capital, former OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil, DST Global, Collaborative Fund and Ascend also participated.

The first product looks like an ordinary baseball cap. Sensors hidden inside it read neural signals through hair without gel, surgery or direct contact with the scalp — and Sabi is developing the cap to translate imagined speech and intent into commands for AI. The company says the non-invasive cap is powered by a custom EEG chip and more than 100,000 hours of labeled neural recordings, which it believes is the largest disclosed dataset of its kind.

In internal benchmarks, Sabi says the chip was more than 50 times as power-efficient as the Texas Instruments ADS1299, a widely used EEG analog front end — which lets the electronics fit inside ordinary headwear while limiting heat and electrical noise. These are company-reported figures that have not been independently audited.

Brain-computer interfaces have largely been designed for clinical settings and cursor control. Sabi is pursuing a different use: a faster, private way to communicate with AI without typing or speaking. An early prototype will debut at CES 2027.

The pitch lands on a real bottleneck: AI can now write, research and take action, but people still direct it through keyboards, touchscreens and voice. If a hat that reads intent actually works at scale, it would be the first consumer brain-computer interface to escape the lab.

Sources