Dydema wants to turn programmable thoughts into computer commands

Dydema wants to give computer users another way to issue commands: choose a thought, then assign it an action.

The startup is developing a noninvasive brain-computer interface with programmable inputs. An imagined movement, for example, could trigger a game control or send a command to an AI agent. Its Y Combinator launch includes a demonstration of the agent use case.

The hardware is still in development. Dydema says its decoding models currently run on research headsets, while the team works on consumer hardware and models that can tolerate cheaper sensors.

Founders Julian Weaver and Christopher Oosthuizen are approaching the challenge as a machine-learning problem. The company says it has accumulated and standardized roughly 128,000 hours of EEG data. It also reports that, after a short setup, its general models can outperform person-specific models on its own benchmarks. Those results are company-reported, rather than independently verified.

The founders have known each other since high school and previously worked as founding engineers at Syntra. Their next challenges include distinguishing more inputs and decoding them faster.

For now, Dydema offers a research-stage glimpse of a customizable input device, with a consumer headset still ahead.

Watch Dydema’s original launch demo.