By
By Dr. Connor Glass, Founder & CEO of Phantom Neuro
When I founded Phantom Neuro in 2020, my mission was simple: improve quality of life by bridging the gap between people and machines. I set out to bring the human touch to robotics and prosthetic limbs. I knew I had my work cut out for me and that it would be extremely challenging. What I was not prepared for was the overwhelming support and validation of the broad-sweeping need for what we were building along the way.
Today, we’re proud to share a key milestone in that journey: our oversubscribed $19 million Series A funding round led by Ottobock, a company that has helped millions of people regain mobility over the last century. With their backing—alongside Breakout Ventures, Draper Associates, LionBird, Time BioVentures, and others—we’re accelerating toward our vision of intuitive, accessible human-machine interfaces that start with real people and scale toward broader robotics.
We’re also happy to share that Phantom X—our core platform—has received both Breakthrough Device Designation and TAP Acceptance from the FDA. These achievements streamline the regulatory path for our minimally invasive neural interface and validate our potential to transform robotic prosthetic limb control and beyond.
From Prosthetics to Possibility
We began where the need is most urgent: enabling amputees to move robotic limbs naturally. Many upper limb amputees abandon prosthetic limbs and roughly 75% still rely on body-powered hooks, a technology unchanged since the Civil War. The Phantom X platform, which will ultimately decode neural signals from beneath the skin in real-time, achieved 94% accuracy across 11 distinct hand and wrist movements in our non-invasive ASCENT study. With just 10 minutes of calibration, our system can restore up to 85% of hand and wrist functionality—without brain surgery, without general anesthesia, without a lab, without a gaggle of technicians and without a mess of wires.
We’re beginning to see this kind of transformation in action. Alex, who lost his arm in a boating accident at age 11, shows how he can use Phantom X to control a prosthetic hand in real-time—moving individual fingers, rotating his wrist, and regaining meaningful function.
Phantom’s technology is designed to be implanted in a simple outpatient procedure. Over 70,000 practitioners across the U.S. can perform it. That accessibility is what turns lab research breakthroughs into real-world impact for people who need it most. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle. It’s everything associated with the patient’s experience and implantation procedure that is equally important to the impact and scalability of a solution.
Prosthetics are just the start.
This moment isn’t just about function. It’s about identity, confidence, and the emotional weight of reclaiming control. It’s also the same kind of feedback loop—between human and machine—that will guide how machines like humanoid robots perform human functions.
The Missing Link in the Future of Robotics
AI models like ChatGPT seem human because they were trained on human-generated language. Self-driving cars perform like humans because they were trained on human-generated driving data. But for robots to move like us—to seamlessly operate in homes, hospitals, or factories—they need to be trained on human movement. And that data doesn’t exist at scale.
Many companies are relying on sensor suits, motion capture, and synthetic training environments. But motion without context isn’t enough. Knowing how far a knee bends or how far a wrist turns or how quickly a hand closes doesn’t tell you how a human performs those movements — how to hold an egg without breaking it— how to gently help an aging parent out of a chair without risking harm.
At Phantom, we collect full-spectrum movement data directly from the body: how muscles coordinate, how force is distributed, how intention turns into joint angles and movements. Think of it like capturing the entire orchestra—not just a single instrument. This is the data the coming generation of robots needs to function more naturally, more intuitively, and more safely. Muscle is evolution’s chosen tool for refined movement. It is the source of the human touch.
The Symphony of Human Movement
Most robotic systems today take complex movements and simple joint angles, then train for one movement at a time. Want a robot to sweep the floor? It has to be trained to sweep. Want it to lift a cup? Back to square one. Each action is treated like a solo performance.
But human movement doesn’t work like that. It’s not a set of isolated commands—it’s a symphony of muscles flexing and extending in coordination with each other to create the complex movements we all take for granted. Each movement consists of the same muscles moving in different ways.
Each limb contains dozens of muscles working in concert to achieve function. Folding a shirt, helping someone stand up, or brushing one’s hair isn’t just about joint angles—it’s about intent, pressure, pace, and coordination. Over 50 muscles might coordinate to perform one action, adjusting in milliseconds based on environment and feedback. It’s this multi-dimensional harmony that Phantom captures and turns into useful data points.
At Phantom Neuro, we aren’t training our systems to replicate one task at a time. We’re capturing the natural orchestration of movement—the nuance and complexity of how humans actually move—to recreate generalized function. By collecting signals straight from the biological source of movement, robotic limbs become mere extensions of, or mimics of the human body.
This is how we are going beyond single use cases to generalizability. And it’s why we believe robotic systems achieving human function won’t come from synthetic datasets—it will come from listening to the symphony of the body itself.
The Utility Gap
For all the advances in robotics— the one thing that hasn’t evolved meaningfully: real-world utility.
Despite robots getting better on paper, their usefulness in everyday life remains stagnant. They can lift more, compute faster, and look sleeker. But they still struggle with basic tasks that matter to people. Why?
Because the missing piece isn’t in the hardware. It’s in the data. It’s in the ability to interact with, adapt to, and learn from human beings so as to replicate human function.
In short, again…. it’s the human touch – what we’re building at Phantom.
The Human Touch—at Scale
We’re at a moment of technological convergence. Meta is investing in domestic robotics. NVIDIA just unveiled a platform for training humanoid machines. Companies like Tesla and Google are pairing LLMs with robotic bodies.
But here’s the thing: human-mimicking robots can’t just be smart and look cool. They have to feel human and trustworthy.
They need a human touch.
That’s what Phantom is delivering —not only in the data we collect, but in the lives we improve.
That’s our focus now and into the future — to make people’s lives meaningfully better as a result of advancements in robotics — by making robots useful in people’s every-day lives.
We’re continuing to work with partners in prosthetic limbs, exoskeletons, and human-mimicking robotics to extend Phantom X beyond the clinic. Because ultimately, the value of any machine lies in its support of the human experience.
And if we want robots to make our lives better, they’ll need to learn from us. The future isn’t about replacing humans with robots. It is about the symbiosis of humans and machines for the net betterment of people’s lives.
Thank you to our investors, our advisors, our patients, and our team. This is just the beginning. More to come.
— Dr. Connor Glass
