In a fundraising round, Musk’s biotechnology startup Neuralink raised $280 million, the company announced Monday via X, the Musk-owned social media platform.

Peter Thiel, the controversial billionaire who was also a cofounder of PayPal, led the Series D round led by Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm.

The company wrote, “We’re looking forward to this next chapter at Neuralink.”.

A brain chip startup wants to connect your brain to a computer using implants, something Musk has been working on for five years. As part of efforts to get the monkey to play Pong, a computer game, a monkey died during project testing in 2022.

Using macaque monkeys for testing, Neuralink has been developing Bluetooth-enabled implants that communicate with computers via a small receiver inserted into the monkey’s brain.

The funding news comes months after Musk announced the company would begin human trials. According to Neuralink’s billionaire founder, the US Food and Drug Administration has accepted most of the company’s paperwork and testing on humans should begin within six months.

According to Reuters, company employees say the company is rushing to market, resulting in careless animal deaths and a federal investigation.

It will take regulatory approval for Neuralink’s brain implants to hit the broader market and become mass-produced. In 2021, the FDA released a paper outlining its initial thoughts on brain-computer interface devices, noting the field is “progressing rapidly.”

The Neuralink Twitter account announced Monday that they were hiring and invited people to “join in on engineering challenges to restore vision and mobility.”