# Blackrock Neurotech **Type:** venture **Status:** Draft **Confidence:** Medium **Focus:** brain-computer interfaces, neural engineering, medical devices, restoration of motor and speech function **Stage:** Private growth company; majority stake held by Tether (via Tether Evo) since April 2024 **Location:** Salt Lake City, UT **Updated:** 2026-05-09 **Needs-reviewed:** 2026-05-09 **Hero:** /img/heroes/front/blackrock-1600.webp **Hero caption:** *Nathan Copeland, who has lived with a Utah Electrode Array implant in his motor and somatosensory cortex since 2014 — temporary hotlinked photograph from the University of Pittsburgh / Rehab Neural Engineering Labs via WIRED; image rights have not yet been cleared.* **Pull:** *The Utah Electrode Array is the most-implanted, most-studied intracortical BCI electrode in history.* ## Summary Blackrock Neurotech is a Salt Lake City company that manufactures and commercializes the Utah Electrode Array, a microelectrode platform invented at the University of Utah by Richard Normann. Public materials describe the Utah Array as the most-implanted and most-studied intracortical brain-computer-interface electrode in history, with documented use in dozens of patients across more than 30,000 cumulative implantation days. The company was founded in 2008 by Florian Solzbacher and Marcus Gerhardt as a University of Utah spinout. In April 2024, the crypto firm Tether took a $200 million majority strategic stake through its Tether Evo venture arm. For the Great Work Utah wiki, Blackrock Neurotech is the cleanest example of a long-horizon Utah deep-tech bet: hardware-first, biology-aware, decades old, and at the substrate of an entire emerging field. ## Impact Blackrock's MoveAgain system — which translates motor-cortex signals into device commands for patients with paralysis, ALS, or locked-in syndrome — has FDA Breakthrough Device designation. The current generation of Utah Arrays gathers neural signals across up to 96–100 electrode channels per device. The company's next-generation device, Neuralace, is described in public materials as a flexible chip with more than 10,000 channels and the potential to enable a fidelity of brain-machine communication that doesn't yet exist. The impact case has two paths. The first is direct clinical deployment: patients regaining functional independence. The second is substrate impact: hundreds of academic labs globally use the Utah Array as a recording standard, which makes Blackrock a critical infrastructure layer for the entire BCI research field. ## What They Are Building The company's product line spans implantable arrays, cabling and headstages, recording and stimulation systems, and the data and software that translate cortical signals into intent. The most consequential engineering problem they are working on is one that has been unsolved for decades: chronic stability. Implanted electrodes degrade as scar tissue forms; signal quality drops over months. The Neuralace flexible-mesh design is the company's bet on conforming to brain tissue rather than puncturing it. For talent, the available evidence suggests Blackrock is a place where neuroscientists, electrical engineers, materials scientists, and signal-processing engineers can ship work that reaches human patients within their careers, not their successors'. ## What They Need Now Likely needs include neural engineers, materials scientists for biocompatible electrode interfaces, signal-processing and machine-learning engineers, regulatory engineers experienced with implantable Class III devices, and clinical operations leaders comfortable with long, FDA-supervised study timelines. The team also benefits from people who can work inside the unusual governance arrangement that comes with a strategic crypto-treasury majority owner — see the caveat below. ## Who Could Help Useful helpers include implantable-device regulatory counsel, FDA Breakthrough Device program specialists, clinical trial managers with neuro-implant experience, IP attorneys who understand the long-tail neural-interface patent landscape, and corporate-governance and finance advisors comfortable with non-traditional majority owners. The Utah neuroengineering and SCI Institute communities are particularly close-by intellectual peers. ## Utah Context Blackrock is part of a small but globally outsized Utah neuroengineering cluster: the University of Utah's neural engineering group, [SCI Institute](sci-institute.md), Ripple Neuro, and Iris Biomedical. The Wasatch Front gives founders and engineers in this domain a peer set that is hard to assemble anywhere else. ## Evidence - [Source: Blackrock Neurotech and the Utah Array](blackrock-utah-array-medical-design.md) - [Utah Array BCI Platform](utah-array-bci-platform.md) — foundational University of Utah research behind the commercial electrode - [Source: Tether Strategic Stake in Blackrock Neurotech](blackrock-tether-strategic-stake.md) ## Open Questions - The Tether majority stake reshapes the company's capital base and governance; observers should watch which Neuralace and BCI roadmap items get prioritized, and whether the unusual ownership structure helps or constrains FDA-track work. - Competitors (Neuralink, Synchron, Precision Neuroscience) are pursuing related goals with very different funding and architecture; Blackrock's institutional advantage is its 30,000-patient-day track record, but the field is intensifying. - The current hero is hotlinked from WIRED's CDN. It shows Nathan Copeland (a University of Pittsburgh BCI patient with a Utah Electrode Array implant) rather than a Blackrock employee or facility, and image rights have not been cleared. Replace with a Blackrock-approved photograph or an independently licensed neural-engineering image before any production use. ## See Also - [Florian Solzbacher](florian-solzbacher.md)