At Tether, our mission has always been to build technology that puts people, not corporations, in control of their own data. With our BCI research and our other open-source technology offerings, we aim to empower every single person and community. 

BCI technology can help combat paralysis by enabling control of robotic limbs and even in the future person-to-person thought communication. This week marked a significant step forward in that mission, as our brain-computer interface (BCI) research team achieved recognition on the global academic stage.

Four of our papers have been accepted to the ICLR Re-align Workshop, two from our core team and two developed in collaboration with the University of Rome Tor Vergata (UniToV). Acceptance at ICLR is validation of the rigour and relevance of our work, and how we are actively pioneering within a strong research network that is driving this field forward. 

Equally exciting, our team earned an Honorable Mention in the Brain2Text 2025 challenge, one of the most competitive benchmarks in the field of neural speech decoding. 

This kind of visibility and cross-institutional collaboration accelerates progress, and we are enormously proud of the team’s achievement here.

These milestones reflect the broader research philosophy that underpins everything we do at Tether. Unlike most players in the BCI space, we are building toward a future in which neural data is processed locally, on-device, and never routed through centralized Big Tech infrastructure. 

Looking ahead, our focus remains on two foundational pillars: open-source, open-access research that the entire scientific community can build upon, and the development of AI architectures that operate across diverse neural signals. This includes research on both invasive and non-invasive neural recordings, vital for humans to maintain intellectual relevance in an AI-driven future.  

We are making tangible progress toward real-time, on-device speech decoding, and our collaboration with UniToV and the broader Brain2Text community is helping to grow the pool of researchers and data that the field so urgently needs. 

Scientific breakthroughs often appear invisible to those on the outside, but are driven by decades of research. Weeks like this one remind us how far we have come, and we look forward to sharing more of our BCI breakthroughs and contributing to an open-source future that puts humans at the center of it.