Sam Altman has tapped Mikhail Shapiro, an award-winning biomolecular engineer, to join the Merge Labs brain-computer interface startup he’s set to announce soon with co-founder Alex Blania. While Shapiro’s official title is unclear, sources say he will be part of Merge’s founding team and has been positioned as a key leader in talks with investors. Those talks are ongoing, but Merge expects to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from OpenAI and others, as The Financial Times earlier reported. Shapiro’s hiring signals a lot about the technical direction Altman is taking with Merge. His engineering lab at Caltech has pioneered several advances in biomolecular tech, with a special focus on noninvasive techniques for neural imaging and control.

Full report : Sam Altman’s brain-computer interface startup Merge Labs hires Mikhail Shapiro, who works on noninvasive techniques for neural imaging and control.