Cortical Labs

Cortical Labs is a Melbourne-based biotech company pioneering biological computing by integrating lab-grown human neurons with silicon chips. Founded in 2019 by Dr. Hon Weng Chong and Andy Kitchen, the company created DishBrain, a system in which real neurons taught themselves to play Pong—a breakthrough published in the journal Neuron in 2022. Cortical Labs has since developed the CL1, the world's first commercially available, code-deployable biological computer, and the Cortical Cloud, a cloud platform that gives developers remote access to living neural networks without needing a specialized lab. The company's technology enables intelligence that learns intuitively with minimal energy and training data compared to conventional AI, with applications spanning medical research, drug discovery, and next-generation computing. In 2026, Cortical Labs launched the first commercial biological data center in Melbourne, with CL1 units deployed across Australia, Singapore, and beyond.