Good morning, Armchair Army,

Over the last 6 months, I've covered 54 ASX-listed healthcare companies.

Only 2 made it into my High Conviction Armchair Picks.

Today, I announce the 3rd.

(Market Cap $40M | Cash Balance: ~$10.0M)*
*post raise

It’s like Elon Musk's Neuralink.

FDA-cleared.

Revenue generating.

Meta paid up to US$1B for a similar tech in 2019.

No invasive surgery.

AND a deal with Apple.

… in a sub-$50 million microcap, on the ASX.

That was the original pitch I heard when I first stumbled onto Control Bionics (ASX: CBL) about six months ago.

I bought shares on the market the very next day…

CBL has developed, over the past 20 years, a technology that reads electrical signals and lets people control devices with their minds.

A brain-computer interface technology.

I've been following the brain-computer interface industry for over ten years, ever since my cousin Nick Opie co-founded Synchron.

Synchron builds an implantable brain-computer interface, a stentrode that's threaded into a blood vessel near the brain's motor cortex.

In November last year, Synchron raised $308 million at around a $1 billion valuation:

… the Australian government also tipped in $54 million.

I remember speaking to Nick in the early days about the challenges of running a deep tech, medtech start-up… but with Elon Musk in the race, there were a lot of eyes on his product.

Both Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are investors in the company that he founded, Synchron:

So... when I heard about this tiny microcap sitting on the ASX that was like Synchron, like Neurolink, but more advanced.

FDA Approval...

Reimbursement Code... 

Deal with Apple… 

No Invasive Surgery…

I had to check with Nick. Is this real?

So I brought Nick in to meet Jeremy Steele, the CEO of Control Bionics.

His exact words after that meeting.

(and I’ll never forget it).

“Jase, I can’t believe how much hard stuff they have been able to do”.

"I assumed it was a couple of blokes in a lab tinkering…”

He then counted the fingers on his hand:

"FDA clearance. Hard.” 

“Getting the device down to the size of a paperclip. Hard.”

“A dedicated reimbursement code. Hard.”

“That Apple deal. Extremely Hard.”

Three months later, Nick has now taken up a board position on Control Bionics.

Founders of serious tech companies don't go to microcaps unless they see something special.

… and we’ve only just scratched the surface of this hidden gem.

Multiple top-tier organisations are using this tech.

All the way from the number 1 hospital in the world, The Mayo Clinic, to elite sports teams like Paris Saint-Germain.

The company just raised $10 million at 7.5 cents, and now is cashed up for the next stage of development.

So, how did we get here, and what is the opportunity?

Control Bionics was founded 21 years ago by an inventor and backed by an investor.

That investor is still the largest shareholder today, and still hasn’t sold a cent.

21 years later…

The idea was to create a technology so technically advanced that it could help the most disabled people interact with the world around them.

The first customer?

Stephen Hawking.

Here is an old school photo of CBL founder Peter Ford with Stephen Hawking:

The underlying technology is called surface electromyography, or sEMG.

It picks up the tiny electrical signal your brain sends to a muscle the moment before (or even instead of) when it moves. 

The problem in the early days was in the practicality.

A giant box. Wires everywhere. Bench-bound.

So Control Bionics needed to shrink it.

Over two decades, they did exactly that.

It now weighs as much as a piece of paper and is about the size of a large paperclip.

This is what the technology looks like now. 

It's a little wireless strip that you stick on your body, reads the muscle signal, and sends it wirelessly to a computer or tablet.

It’s incredibly powerful at reading muscle signals for sports performance and rehab.

Measuring muscle to brain signals to improve rehab outcomes.

Control Bionics company has a second product, NeuroNode, which is like a watch.

Measuring muscle to brain signals and controlling a computer with your brain's intent.

CBL sells its wearable surface EMG technology to a big tech company for many multiples of its current share price.

This is what I hope happens. No guarantees, and there are a bunch of risks and challenges that CBL will need to work through before it gets there.

My Armchair Entry Price for CBL is $0.075.

20+ years of development to take a surface electromyography product from a giant box to the size of a paperclip. Designed to be incredibly sensitive and collect incredible amounts of data from the most disabled people.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Synchron, and the whole BCI race is about reading human intent and turning it into action.

CBL is on the non-invasive end of that same spectrum. No brain surgery, FDA-approved product, HCPCS code secured.

Back in 2019, Facebook (Meta) bought CTRL-Labs for somewhere around US$1B million, which had a similar surface EMG technology.

In November 2025, CBL integrated Apple's new Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Human Interface Device protocol into the NeuroNode line, one of only a handful of organisations globally to do so.

Oura, the smart ring, raised ~US$900M in October 2025 at a ~US$11 billion valuation.

Whoop, the screenless fitness band, raised US$575M in March 2026 at a US$10.1 billion valuation.

Control Bionics technology, coupled with Apple’s BCI firmware, is set up as the platform to potentially create the next Whoop or Oura.

Control Bionics already has deals with major European football club Paris Saint-Germain, as well as GWS, Hawthorn, the Australian Rugby and the Australian Institute of Sport, for using its technology for sports performance and rehab.

The NeuroStrip is already in neuro and rehab institutions, Penn State Health, Mountain Land Physical Therapy, Barrow Neurological Institute (one of the largest neuro centres in the world), Royal Rehab (50+ Australian locations), Bay State Physical Therapy (160+ US clinics)…

…oh, and the Mayo Clinic.

In May 2026, Professor Nicholas Opie, Synchron co-founder, joined CBL as a Non-Executive Director and strategic advisor.

In January 2026, CBL signed both Tobii Dynavox and PRC-Saltillo, the two global leaders in assistive communication, to distribute the NeuroNode.

This provides a capital-light way to sell and distribute its NeuroNode product in the US.

Nightingale Partners and Phoenix Development Fund have been investors in CBL since the very beginning. They haven’t sold a share in over 20 years and collectively own ~35% of the company.

The way I like to think about this business is in three buckets. 

Cause the company has developed a LOT.

(This is my framing, but it maps closely to how they describe their three pillars.)

1. Medical: The assistive-technology and rehab-based. The original mission. Hard, regulated, reimbursement-driven. But where the majority of the revenue is driven right now.

2. Professional: Elite sport performance and sport rehab. No regulator, no rebate, selling to people with money. Growth area.

3. Consumer: the blue-sky wearable play. The Whoop, Oura, Apple dream. 

Each of these individual “buckets” is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for the company.

The challenge is that Control Bionics is a microcap with limited funds.

It can’t do everything.

So, it needs to identify creative ways to leverage others to advance their technology.

Today, I’m going to look at each “bucket” individually.

Starting with the Blue Sky, the working my way backwards.

When I first heard about the idea of a brain-computer interface, I saw endless potential.

Let’s be honest… 

I just thought it would be cool to play Mario Kart with thoughts alone.

Parking the daydream for a second…

The consumer market for technology and wearables is big.

Whoop, a strap that reads your heart rate and recovery off your wrist, just raised US$575 million at a US$10 billion valuation:

Oura, the ring that tracks your sleep, heart rate and temperature, raised US$900 million at a US$11 billion valuation:

Whoop and Oura measure your body's state. 

How hard your heart is working, how well you slept, and how recovered you are. 

Control Bionics reads your intent.

The signal your brain fires to a muscle the instant before you move, or instead of moving at all.

That's a harder signal to capture, not Whoop, not Oura, not anyone has built the consumer wearable that runs on it.

Yet…

But in 2019, Meta acquired a brain-computer interface technology that works with surface EMG for around US$1B million:

So, Control Bionics has this technology that captures the intent signal.

What consumer applications for such a technology?

Gaming, health tracking, there was even a brief period in Control Bionics’ history where this technology was being looked at by the US Department of Defence.

… lots of possibilities, only so much capital for CBL.

So it has moved towards the “platform” business model. 

Build the underlying technology and let others come up with the creative applications.

There is one thing that makes this “platform” all possible.

Apple.

Late last year, Control Bionics signed a deal to integrate its sEMG technology with Apple's brain-computer interface input protocol, the firmware layer that decides what's allowed to talk to an iPhone or an iPad and move the cursor:

There are only two other companies with this access.

Synchron is one of them.

… and speaking to my cousin Nick, who is the founder of Synchron, that deal was very, very hard to get.

What this unlocks for Control Bionics is the ability for anyone to build on top of their technology.

The next Whoop…

The next Oura…

The next big wearable device product… 

Built on top of the Control Bionics platform and Apple’s Brain Computer Interface.

Win for founders, who don’t need to invest all the upfront capital to develop a physical sEMG device.

Win for Control Bionics, who clips the ticket on the way through.

That’s the blue sky.

(And maybe a takeout from one of these big tech companies that may want to own the tech all to themselves...)

The ASX is familiar with sports tech and has had big wins in the sector.

Catapult Sports (ASX: CAT) is one of the darling tech stocks on the ASX.

From an enterprise value of $55 million in 2014 to a peak market cap of $2 billion…

A true unicorn on the ASX.

Sport tech, performance, and rehab are the main growth areas for CBL.

Control Bionics NeuroStrip is incredibly advanced and provides a team with objective, real-time data on what an athlete's muscles are actually doing.

Here’s the dashboard that reads the muscle signals and pathways:

The key use cases for this technology are:

Three incredibly important factors for any professional sport. 

… and do you know what sports teams have that most hospital networks don’t?

Money.

In a recent webinar published by Control Bionics, CEO Jeremy Steele mentioned initial customers included…

GWS, Hawthorn, and PSG.

Yep, Paris Saint-Germain, a legendary French football club, is currently using the Control Bionics product.

The value makes sense.

PSG’s top player earns €350,000 per week.

Every week he is on the bench and out injured, it costs PSG hundreds of thousands of dollars (literally).

Just bringing him back one single week early without any increased risk of injury is a massive win.

(and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars).

Surface EMG has been in the “promising technology” bucket in the sports and rehab sector for a long time.

But it has never ACTUALLY been good enough to be used on a broad scale.

This is because the existing sEMG products' data was trash, the signal was weak, and they didn’t really work and were too cumbersome to use in a clinical or sports environment.

But Control Bionic’s product was designed for the hardest user imaginable.

Someone who literally can’t move, with almost no detectable muscle signal at all.

If you can read a paralysed person's faint twitch, reading a footballer’s hamstring is the easy part.

This is why (I think) the company has seen rapid uptake in interest from big sports clubs.

Clubs have wanted this tech for a while; now they can get it.

It’s still early days, and the business model is still being refined.

But at least Control Bionics has a product that people want (and need).

The company's founding mission was to support people with disabilities.

There are two markets that I see Control Bionics targeting here: Rehab and Assistive Technology

Control Bionics is looking to sell its NeuroStrip product into the general rehabilitation market.

(Think stroke recovery, muscle recovery, accident recovery, etc…)

The value proposition?

Make invisible muscle activity visible, so clinicians can target the exact muscle driving a problem.

CBL has been collecting these “case studies” of how its tech has been used to solve problems where traditional rehab fails.

I’ll share one with you today out of the Stroke Lab in Japan:

A patient recovering from a serious brain bleed had been left with dangerous walking instability, repeated stumbling, and traditional rehab was struggling to pinpoint the cause.

With the NeuroStrip on, clinicians could see it in real time: the patient's right calf muscle was over-contracting. They targeted that muscle directly.

The results were a 39% reduction in muscle overactivity and zero falls on the post-intervention walking round-trip.

That’s just one of multiple stories like this.

On this front, CBL has deals with:

…oh, and the Mayo Clinic. 

For eight years running, Newsweek has named Mayo Clinic the #1 hospital in the world.

Aussie investors know that name too.

Earlier this year, 4DMedical (ASX: 4DX) announced Mayo Clinic had deployed its CT:VQ technology. 

Price spiked.

The very next day, EchoIQ (ASX: EIQ) signed a deal with the Mayo Clinic as well… again, a share price run.

(I remember these because they were within a couple of days of each other)

Aussie investors look for external validation of technology.

… and when the #1 hospital in the world is using the technology, that's about as strong validation as you can get.

The assistive technology was where CBL’s original business model emerged.

Build a product for the most disabled person, and help them interact with the world.

The company has been developing its tech for years towards this goal.

Years of development.

FDA approval.

HCPCS code.

Sales in the US.

There is an amazing customer review showing how a completely paralysed person communicates through Control Bionics’ NeuroNode (a bit different to the strip) through a tiny twitch in his knee:

For years, Control Bionics tried to sell its assistive technology directly in the US… and ran straight into the wall every small medical-device company hits.

A tiny sales team is no match for the entrenched competitors with 150+ reps and decades of clinical relationships.

It was David vs Goliath.

You can have the better device and still lose, simply because you don’t have enough sales bodies on the floor.

But as the old saying goes…

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

That is exactly what Control Bionics has done.

Instead of competing head-to-head, it has now signed distribution agreements with these competitors.

Winding down the sales team in the US (and reducing the company overheads), while gaining a stronger distribution channel.

(With literally hundreds of reps now being able to sell NeuroNode).

The product has its own reimbursement code (US$4,300 per unit), which is one of the most valuable tools a medtech rep can use.

Here are Control Bionics’ distributors:

The company also secured reimbursement in Germany earlier this year (and guess who the largest sellers of assistive technology are in Germany… Tobii and PRC).

This has been the primary driver of revenue for Control Bionics, but it has also hamstrung the company for a long time.

Building sales teams in the US is not their strength… It's building awesome technology.

Now, I’m always hesitant about distribution partnerships because why would your competitor sell your product over their own?

But in this scenario, CBL’s product is fully reimbursed and is complementary to the eyetrack software sold by Tobii and PRC. 

The number-one shareholders are two funds, Nightingale Partners and Phoenix Development Fund, and they've been funding this thing since basically inception.

If Nightingale sounds familiar, you might recognise it from this AFR piece about parting with 9% of its stake in Mayfield… for $30 million.

Mayfield was one of Nightingale’s “big bets”... and CBL is next.

Both Nightingale and Phoenix are chaired by Lindsay Phillips.

That investor who supported the founding mission all those years ago with inventor Peter Ford and first customer Stephen Hawking.

That was in the early 2000s.

… and neither of Lindsay’s funds has sold a single share.

A very different type of investor. 

Long term. Deep tech. Mission-driven.

After the stock collapsed from its IPO position in 2021, there was what I’d call the “rebuilding years”.

The years of quiet execution, where fundraising is done by a handful of small raises and rights issues.

No big brokers.

This has allowed Nightingale and Phoenix to emerge with their 35% holding well intact:

That makes for an incredibly tight share register.

But I've got this saying: no conflict, no interest.

A handful of large shareholders can't be the main driver of liquidity in a stock forever.

You need to bring others on board.

That's what this $10 million raise is about: not just financing the company as it takes the pivotal step in its journey, but also bringing more institutional and retail investors into the story.

…and I’d bet Nightingale and Phoenix have tipped back into this raise again.

The whole US growth strategy relies on partners to do the selling.

Tobii and PRC are the right partners, but there is a risk that sales reps will focus on their own products rather than selling CBL’s.

There needs to be real motivation to drive sales outside of just ‘a better margin’.

Right now, CBL is in the “product market fit” phase of growth in the sports market, with early trials and pilots.

There is no guarantee that this turns into a profitable business.

There's a lot going on in this business: AAC, sport, rehab, distribution, and Apple BCI.

For a company this size, the question is whether there's enough attention to go around.

The company isn't profitable yet, so it may need to raise dilutive capital from the market at some point to accelerate its growth.

However, this has been de-risked for the near future with a $10 million capital raise.

There is a risk that new technology in the Brain Computer Interface will emerge that outpaces or supersedes Control Bionics.

A large part of my bet on Control Bionics is that it gets acquired for its technology. There is no guarantee that this ever eventuates.

For over ten years, I've watched my cousin Nick Opie build up Synchron and raise hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the biggest names in tech.

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates are all sitting at the brain-computer interface table.

… and CBL is looking to get a seat.

It has developed its technology for over 20 years, and it has been built for the most disabled person.

Someone who cannot move.

That’s why it's head and shoulders above any other surface EMG product out there.

A technology built as a medical device with potential consumer applications.

When evaluating a company, I always look for external validation.

Partnerships or contracts with companies that have done their due diligence.

CBL has that.

Apple. Paris Saint-Germain. Mayo Clinic.

… all have deals with CBL.

After a splash at IPO, the company has spent the last few years in quiet execution mode, building the business model and the tech platform.

Incredibly tight share register, and now the funding to make its pivotal step.

This company is a moonshot.

Deep tech always is.

But I'm backing the technology, I'm backing my cousin who has done it before, and I'm backing CEO Jeremy and the major investors to land another windfall.

THAT is why I’ve named Control Bionics (ASX: CBL) as my third High-Conviction Armchair Pick.

Big thank you to everyone at CBL who's shared the story.

See you all tomorrow,

The Armchair Analyst.