SINGAPORE: Nick Opie – co-founder of brain chip company Synchron that counts Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos as investors – has been awarded 1.25 million options to turbocharge minnow Control Bionics.
But if he succeeds, Jim Chalmers wants to tax the payout twice as hard.
Professor Opie is joining ASX-listed Control Bionics as a non-executive director and strategic adviser as the Treasurer is moving to gut the share-based rewards that lure start-up talent to Australia.
Control Bionics is worth $23m and reads muscle signals through the skin, unlike Synchron, which implants hardware in the brain via stent-like surgery.
The Treasurer’s proposed overhaul would scrap the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount and replace it with indexation. For founders and the staff they pay in equity, the rate on a gain would climb from about 23.5 per cent to between 46 and 47 per cent – a near doubling of the bill on exactly the risk-taking the government says it wants more of.
Professor has stayed in Melbourne while Synchron decamped its headquarters to the US, and he intends to keep building from here. But he is less sure the tax change will let founders like him do that.
“Part of their salary is shares, and to try and tax them doesn’t align with how the system’s set up to get the best talent and the best investors in Australia,” Professor Opie said.
Some of Australia’s most successful entrepreneurs have joined a growing backlash against the Albanese government’s proposed tax changes, warning the measures risk driving founders offshore and making the country a less attractive place to build globally competitive companies from.
Business founders David Dicker, Paul Lederer and Shaun Bonett have all criticised the government’s plans to overhaul capital gains tax concessions, arguing the changes would discourage risk-taking, punish successful start-ups and encourage the next generation of founders to establish businesses overseas.
“Anything that is done in the budget that’s actually acted on that prevents or causes people to believe that investing in Australia is not a good idea, is not a good idea. I’ll be clear on that,” Professor Opie said.
“You want people to be investing in Australian technologies, you want people to be coming to Australia to work and to work on these technologies.”
Professor Opie used to spend half the year in the US where Synchron is now headquartered after it struggled to raise a cent locally. It has established itself in New York and is beating Elon Musk’s Neuralink to key milestones in the brain chip race.
But his decision to join Control Bionics – which is based in Cremorne in the cluster of inner-southeast software firms now dubbed ‘Silicon Yarra – turns on a single distinction, and one that could gain commercial traction from people who paralysed by “locked-in syndrome” to helping athletes recover from injuries faster.
“They’ve been playing in the same neurotech space, with a different solution to the same problem,” Professor Opie said when comparing Synchron to Control Bionics.
For patients with locked-in syndrome – conscious minds inside still bodies – the choice between the two is the choice between a stent-like operation and a device you put on.
“These people, their brains are fine, but their bodies have failed them,” Professor Opie said.
Control Bionics use wearables attached to the skin that amplifies whatever faint electrical signal a patient has left.
He sees the muscle-signal approach closing a gap that eye-tracking software never has. Existing eye-gaze tools let a paralysed user drag a cursor across a screen with their pupils, then stall at the moment of selection.
“These eye-tracking things are great if your eyes work,” he said. “The only thing they’re lacking is a switch or a mouse click.”
Control Bionics makes two wearables, its NeuroNode – which reads the signals of patients too weak to move a limb and routes them to a computer – and its NeuroStrip that captures physiological data.
“Without surgical intervention, it opens the doors for medical and sports rehab, as well as consumer goods,” he said. “Synchron, being a medical device requiring intervention – it’s unlikely to go down that pathway.”
“If you’re trying to rehab someone from a stroke or hamstring injury, or whatever it is, you can look specifically at these different groups and say, ‘OK, well, this muscle is activating more than that one, let’s put them on this pathway, let’s sort of strengthen that muscle group rather than the other one, and try and get them back to a better spot’.
“Or in terms of the athletes, ‘is there a way that you can improve their performance by making sure all the muscles are operating at their optimal level?’ So, I think there’s a lot that’s going to come out on that space.”
Control Bionics chairman Stephen Rix said Prof Opie’s appointment was an important step in strengthening the company’s technical, clinical and strategic capability.
“Nick is one of the most respected figures in neural interfaces and applied neurotechnology. His decision to join Control Bionics reflects the strength of the company’s science, the breadth of its potential applications and the opportunity to build a larger Australian neurotechnology business with global potential,” Mr Rix said.