Sitting in a meeting room in a startup office in Lisbon, I silently typed the answer to a question only the person opposite would know the answer to. What kind of coffee had I asked for when I’d arrived at the office? A short moment later, without even moving or opening his mouth, the reply came back via a text message: “You had an Americano.”

This wasn’t how I’d expected to spend a Friday afternoon in the city, but here I was, sitting in the offices of enterprise language translation services startup Unbabel, opposite founder and CEO Vasco Pedro, testing what appeared to be a brain-to-computer interface. And it was pretty astounding.

The story begins four years ago.

Unbabel’s core mission -- allowing enterprises to understand and be understood by their customers in dozens of languages -- long ago led the company to think outside the proverbial "box," to develop several projects in-house. It wanted to explore other ways to communicate. Now, as a startup with $90 million in VC funding, annual revenues of around $50 million and having survived the pandemic, Unbabel is doing well enough to explore these projects.

“We had the idea of looking at brain-to-communication interfaces,” Pedro tells me. “We started doing a bunch of experiments, like a 20% project.”

Unbabel’s innovation team, led by Paulo Dimas, VP of Product Innovation, looked into the way our brains evolved.

“You have your limbic system, you have your neocortex. But they’ve actually evolved over millions of years. They're actually separate systems. And I think what we're starting to see is almost the creation of the ‘uber cortex,’ which we think is going to be AI-powered, and it's going to be existing outside of your biological brain,” said Pedro.

Dimas and his team started to look into electroencephalogram (EEG) systems, some of which can be invasive to the body. Elon Musk’s Neuralink company is famously exploring invasive brain-computer interface devices for humans.