Vinod Khosla Backs An AI Startup Building A Mind-Reading Baseball Cap

Sabi CEO Rahul Chhabra says the way humans interact with artificial intelligence in the future will be radically different— and far more effortless. We won’t type out instructions. Or click buttons on computers. Or even talk to AI companions on our phones. Instead, we’ll just think of things we want our personal AI agents to do, and voila, they’ll go and do them.

It sounds like magic or science fiction, he admits, but his two-year-old startup is hoping to turn it into reality. Sabi is building a baseball cap that can convert neural signals into text-based prompts for AI systems. Its prototype is lined with up to 100,000 sensors, each of them a one-to-five millimeter chip that can capture brain activity. A “brain foundational model,” trained on 100,000 hours of labelled neural data, then interprets the meaning behind a thought or idea in your brain and transcribes it as a prompt for AI.

That might sound crazy. The concept is nascent and largely unproven. But such is the AI funding frenzy that Sabi has already drawn backing from marquee venture capitalists. Billionaire investor Vinod Khosla, No. 1 on the 2026 Midas List who was the first institutional investor into OpenAI, is leading the company’s $50 million seed funding round, Sabi announced Thursday.

“Very simply, thought-to-computer input is a sexy idea,” Khosla tells Forbes.

He adds, “Typing is not natural. Before you start typing, you have to think about what you’re going to type. If you can intercept the brain… it’s awesome.”

Top-tier VC firms like Accel, DST Global and Initialized Capital are also backing the startup, alongside Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s former chief product officer. The investment values the company at $600 million, according to a person familiar with the deal.

“You’re not going to do a billion brain surgeries. We don’t have enough surgical rooms,” Khosla says. “This is far better than brain surgery if it can do the same thing.”