InteraXon, the Toronto, Canada-based company behind the Muse headset for thought-controlled computing, today announced that it has raised a $6 million Series A round from a number of prominent investors, including Horizon Ventures, OMERS Ventures, A-Grade Investments (Ashton Kutcher’s investment company), ff Venture Capital, Felicis Ventures, and Bridge Builders. The company, which was founded in 2007, made the announcement at Vancouver’s GROW conference.
The Muse is a six-sensor headset that monitors your brainwaves, and the company positions it as “leading in brainwave-enabled devices, applications and experiences.” The Muse is scheduled to launch next year and InteraXon plans to launch it together with its Brain Health System, a development platform for the headset and a brain fitness application with exercises that help users enhance their cognitive skills. As the company notes, it also plans to build numerous other Muse apps.
The company has been demoing its headset for a while now and also raised almost $300,000 on Indiegogo. The idea here is that you will be able to control your computers with your brain. It’s technology we’ve seen in numerous lab prototypes over the last few years, but it hasn’t quite made it into consumers’ hands (and onto their heads) yet.
As InteraXon CEO Ariel Garten told me after she made the announcement at GROW, her expectation is that developers will take the first version of the Muse and start building innovative applications right from the start. In her view, it will take about 10 years, though, before we’ll really be able to control our computers with our brain and maybe even 25 years before this will become the default way of interacting with our machines.
Our own Colleen Taylor got a chance to try the Muse earlier this year.