Melbourne Startup Cortical Labs Hits Commercial Milestones With Biological Computer

Melbourne-based biological computing startup Cortical Labs has reached a series of global commercialisation milestones within six months of receiving a $245,000 Early-Stage Commercialisation grant through the Australian Government’s Industry Growth Program (IGP).

The company, which builds hybrid biological-digital computing systems using living human neural cells grown on silicon chips, used the funding to bridge the gap between a working prototype and a commercially accessible product.

From prototype to product

Cortical Labs has used the IGP grant to prepare its CL1 biological computer for commercial launch and to build Cortical Cloud, the cloud-based infrastructure that gives researchers and developers remote access to the hardware.

The CL1 was commercially launched at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March 2025. Cortical Cloud went live to the general public in early 2026, and in February 2026 the company released a public programming API for interacting with biological neural networks.

In March 2026, Cortical Labs announced a partnership with DayOne, a data centre operator based in Singapore, to construct Singapore’s first biological data centre.

Dr Brett J. Kagan, Co-Founder and CSO/COO of Cortical Labs, pointed to the IGP as a turning point in the company’s trajectory.

“The Industry Growth Program supported us at exactly the right moment when we had a working prototype but needed to build the commercial infrastructure to make it accessible to the world,” Dr Kagan explained.

“The Cortical Cloud, which the IGP helped us commercialise, is now the platform underpinning our global expansion, including our biological data centres in Melbourne. This is what early-stage government support looks like when it’s well-targeted: it accelerates companies that are building genuinely new categories, not incremental improvements.”

How biological computing works

The CL1 uses synthetic biology methods to cultivate living human neural cells from induced stem cells onto a silicon chip. The result is a hybrid biological-digital system that learns and adapts using a fraction of the energy and training data required by conventional AI.

The technology is being positioned against a backdrop of growing pressure on energy grids and sustainability targets driven by data centre demand. According to Cortical Labs, a rack of 20 CL1 units draws approximately 0.6 kilowatts of power, compared with the multi-megawatt requirements of conventional AI training infrastructure.

Melbourne data centre now operational

As part of the IGP-supported project, Cortical Labs has continued to expand its research and commercialisation activities. This includes work on what the company calls Bioengineered Intelligence (BI) units – small, organised neuron cultures trained to perform complex information processing tasks.

The company’s Melbourne biological data centre prototype, housing 120 CL1 units, is now fully operational. Cortical Labs reports it is attracting users from around the world who are exploring a range of potential applications for the technology.

What the grant delivered

The Cortical Labs case offers a concrete example of what targeted early-stage government funding can produce in a deep tech context. A $245,000 grant helped move a laboratory prototype to a commercially launched product with a public API, a cloud platform, an operational data centre in Melbourne and an international partnership in Singapore – all within a 12-month window.

The trajectory suggests the IGP grant landed at a point where a relatively small amount of public funding was able to unlock commercial momentum that might otherwise have taken significantly longer to build.

Last Updated on June 28, 2026 by Nick Ross