Happy Monday.

If you were at YC AI Startup School this week, welcome! We just cohosted an (oversubscribed) picnic for nearly a thousand students from all over.

This week’s startup deep dive feels like something out of a movie. By building prosthetics that can be controlled using brain waves, Morph Labs is pioneering the next generation of artificial limbs.

Arek and Ethan 🦄

There are few concepts as seminal to science fiction as the cybernetic limb. From Luke Skywalker’s hand to RoboCop’s arm, artificial limbs have long been imagined to be a seamless integration of flesh and steel. And yet, despite the rapid advancements of AI and robotics, what reaches patients today remains a far cry from that vision. The most widely deployed type of prosthetic captures muscle signals from the patient’s residual limb using EMGs, electromyograms, as the method of control. Morph Labs is betting on a different signal source, the brain. Its headband captures brain signals using EEGs, electroencephalograms, and translates them into movement intent that controls the movement of any prosthetic. It is beginning by integrating this system with a prosthetic hand, creating a more comfortable and effortless experience for patients with below-the-elbow limb loss.

Check it out: morphlabs.tech

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This is sponsored content.

Morph Labs plans to sell to clinics and providers who supply prosthetic devices to patients and bill insurance for reimbursement. It is also exploring additional revenue streams through a B2B API licensing layer for its EEG algorithms.

Morph Labs accepts applications through the Morph Labs Talent Portal. It’s a quick form where you submit your resume and a 75-word pitch. If you submit an application, let us know by replying to this email!

The three Morph Labs co-founders began their entrepreneurial pursuits when they signed up for the Y Combinator Co‑Founder Matching program in 2024, where they met each other. They all had an interest in building in med tech, and their first call ended up being a 6-hour brainstorming session of various areas they could disrupt. They eventually landed on building a more functional prosthetic hand, and created one with 19 degrees of freedom, the amount needed to be comparable to the dexterity of a human hand, which has 23.

However, after speaking with occupational therapists, clinicians, prosthetists, and people with amputations, the team concluded that the main problem was not hand capability but control. That pushed them to innovate at the sensor level and build a brain-computer interface that enables users to effortlessly move their prosthetic.

A prosthetic limb can cost as much as a car, yet people are leaving it in the closet. According to a 2022 article published in Disability and Rehabilitation, across all amputation levels, roughly 44 percent of upper limb prostheses are abandoned, with 61 percent of the same cohort citing comfort and 52 percent citing weight as their leading complaints. Similarly, in the largest national survey of veterans with upper limb amputation, only 60 percent of those with unilateral amputation used a prosthesis at all, and just 52 percent wore it eight or more hours a day. 

Existing bionic hands often go unused because they're difficult to live with for two main reasons. First, they rely on sensors that pick up electrical signals from the muscles in your remaining arm, which means users have to tense those muscles constantly just to move the hand, leading them to experience muscle fatigue. Second, the hardware facilitating the sensors makes the prosthetics bulky, heavy, and ultimately, uncomfortable to wear. These problems are exacerbated for patients with more severe amputations who have fewer muscle signals and require larger prosthetics.

EEG control is the solution, as it decouples control from the residual limb entirely. Because intent is read from the brain instead of from the residual limb muscles, the signal does not decay with poor socket fit, sweat, or the loss of usable musculature at higher amputation levels. As a result, the user gets consistent and reliable control.

But there remains a high bar to cross to get EEG to succeed. Even the most capable invasive systems, which place electrodes directly on the cortex, reach only about 80 percent motor task accuracy and stay confined to laboratory settings because of portability and chronicity limits. Moreover, current scalp EEG is noisy and prone to detecting unwanted signals, as its decoders drift across sessions and users and an estimated 15 to 30 percent of users unable to generate reliable control at all. However, when researchers decoded lower-limb movement from EEG in 2022, accuracy showed no significant difference between people with an amputation and people without limb loss, demonstrating that the brain's movement intent stays intact even when the limb and the muscles that once carried it do not.

To win, Morph will have to deliver an EEG headset that matches EMG's reliability and responsiveness while beating it on setup, comfort, and the number of movements it can actually resolve. If it executes on this, the advantages will be monumental. And if successful, Morph Labs would effectively restore movement at the speed of thought.