Getting Started with NeuroNexus

NeuroNexus · neuronexus.com · Resources

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NeuroNexus makes electrodes, instruments, and software for electrophysiology: a catalog of thousands of probe and array variants, custom designs when the catalog does not fit your target, and Radiens software, free to start. Engineered together — and usable à la carte. This guide introduces the company, its three technology platforms, and where to go next on neuronexus.com and radiens.ai ↗.

Company at a glance#

NeuroNexus is a full-stack electrophysiology company: electrodes, instruments, and software for neural recording and stimulation, engineered together — and usable à la carte. The electrodes are thin-film microelectrode arrays — silicon probes that penetrate the brain, spinal cord, nerves, ganglia, or heart, and flexible polymer grids that record from the surface of the cortex, the skull, the heart, or a peripheral nerve — in a catalog of thousands of probe and array variants, with custom designs when the catalog does not fit the target. The instruments are the headstages and acquisition systems that read them, and the software is Radiens, which is free to start. Founded in 2004 as a spin-out of the University of Michigan and based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, NeuroNexus has spent more than 20 years on neural-interface technology, building on the original Michigan probe (Wise et al. (1970) ↗; Vetter et al. (2004) ↗). Its technology appears in more than 5,000 peer-reviewed publications and is used in more than 1,000 laboratories across six continents, for acute and chronic in vivo studies, organoids, and brain slices, and in species from fruit flies to non-human primates.

See more about the company at About us.

Key attributes include:

• Global commercial business in life science and neurosurgery research
• Spun out of the University of Michigan in 2004
• Acquired by Integer in 2012 (public med-tech company)
• Acquired by NEL Group, Inc. in 2019 (private investment company consisting of a few individual investors--including founders--each with deep knowledge of neurotechnology)
• 19 people: 9 engineers & scientists (3 PhDs), 7 production specialists
• Strong IP and technology platforms

Interacting with us#

We are a small neurotechnology company driven by our interest in the field. If you have a question, an issue, or an idea for an experiment, we consider it worth exploring—there's no cutoff for what is worth asking or discussing.

• Contact us
• support@neuronexus.com ·
• +1.734.913.8858

Figure 1. NeuroNexus at a glance: 22 years pioneering neural-interface technology since 2004; 5,100+ peer-reviewed papers citing the technology across neuroscience and engineering; 1,000+ laboratories across six continents; and full-stack IP — proprietary designs, processes, and software developed in-house.

NeuroNexus Technology Platforms#

NeuroNexus develops solutions that accelerate neuroscience, neurological therapies, and drug discovery — from organoids to patients, in vivo and in vitro. The work spans the central nervous system, spinal cord, peripheral nerve, and heart in vivo; organoids and brain slices in vitro; and neurosurgery and neuromodulation in the clinic, across species from fruit flies to non-human primates. In every case, recording depends on three things: an electrode that fits the target, an instrument that reads it, and software that turns the signals into results.

Three technology platforms provide those three things, and NeuroNexus engineers them together (Figure 2). The electrode platform comprises thin-film probes and grids — a catalog of thousands of variants for diverse neural targets, plus custom designs for targets the catalog does not cover. The instrumentation platform comprises headstages and acquisition systems that record, stimulate, and close the loop, matched to the probes. The Radiens software platform takes recordings from acquisition through analysis, carrying quality and provenance across the whole workflow. Each platform works on its own alongside the equipment a lab already runs; together, they cover the path from electrode to answer.

Figure 2. The NeuroNexus technology platforms. Electrode platform: silicon probes and thin-film grids for diverse neural targets. Radiens software platform: the workflow from recording to result. Instrumentation platform: headstages and acquisition systems that record, stimulate, and close the loop. Applications span organoids to patients.

Electrode Platform: Silicon Probes and Thin-film Grids#

NeuroNexus makes two types of thin-film electrodes for different neural or cardiac targets (Figure 3). Silicon probes are micro-scale devices with thin shanks that penetrate the brain, spinal cord, nerves, ganglia, or heart, placing electrode sites close to internal structures. Thin-film grids are thin, flexible polyimide devices placed on the surface of the brain, skull, spinal cord, nerve, or heart to record surface biopotentials. Both are made by thin-film microfabrication — thin conductive and dielectric (insulating) layers deposited on a substrate and patterned by photolithography, the approach that produced the first silicon microelectrodes and multisite probes (Wise et al. (1970) ↗; Najafi et al. (1985) ↗) — so each device's geometry is fixed by a mask set, reproducible from unit to unit, and designed for the target. The probe catalog includes 216 silicon probe designs in ten families and 53 grid designs in four, each with a datasheet. The Silicon Probes and Thin-Film Grids introduction covers the electrode platform in depth, and NeuroNexus Probe Technology: Questions and Answers provides the materials and supporting evidence.

Figure 3. The two electrode platforms. (Left) Silicon — rigid penetrating arrays: a 256-site Buzsáki-layout probe die, a shank tip with its electrode sites, insertion into tissue, and dies on the wafer. (Right) Polymer — flexible surface arrays: a 32-channel EEG grid, a 12-channel nerve cuff, a 64-channel cardiac grid, and a 64-channel deep brain stimulation array.

Radiens Software Platform#

Radiens is NeuroNexus's electrophysiology software: Radiens Standard, free to open, read, and convert any lab's data; Radiens Pro for professional analysis and scaling a working lab; and Radiens Services when you want NeuroNexus scientists working alongside you. It spans the workflow from recording to results, in vivo and in vitro: Allego records in real time with live signal-quality metrics at the rig, and Videre opens the data afterward in linked spatial and visual views that show the structure of the recording. Radiens runs locally, so data stays in the lab's storage, and it preserves quality and provenance across the workflow, making results reproducible. Allego reads any acquisition stream live, and NeuroNexus adds support for new probes as they are released (Figure 4). See Radiens for more information.

Figure 4. Allego, the Radiens real-time acquisition application, at the rig: the electrode map of a 32-site A1x32-Poly3 silicon probe (left) beside the live signal monitor (right), 32 channels streaming through an XDAQ headstage.

Instrumentation Platform#

NeuroNexus engineers its instrumentation platform for high performance, reliability, longevity, and affordability. It comprises headstage amplifiers, data acquisition systems, and fully integrated software, with support components for both complete systems and modular use. The platform connects directly to all NeuroNexus electrodes, supports SiNAPS active probes (Angotzi et al. (2019) ↗) and most third-party electrodes, and runs Neuropixels on XDAQ in beta. It supports multimodal experiments, including neural recording, electrical stimulation, optogenetic stimulation, and synchronization with behavioral and related equipment, and it scales from a single electrode to systems of four or more, and from a few channels to 1,024+. The acquisition software reads most third-party acquisition streams, so the platform fits into an existing lab setup. See Instrumentation and the Data Acquisition Systems overview for more information.

Figure 5. Smartbox Pro acquisition system, front panel: four recording-headstage ports (A–D).

Applications and Solutions#

NeuroNexus electrodes, instrumentation, and software are used worldwide in diverse studies using in vivo and in vitro models. In vivo applications include cortex, deep brain, hippocampus, spinal cord, peripheral nerve, ganglia, and heart, in acute and chronic preparations across species from fruit flies (Van De Poll and van Swinderen (2025) ↗) to non-human primates (Perich et al. (2026) ↗), including large-scale recordings of neuronal ensembles (Buzsáki (2004) ↗). In vitro applications include organoids and brain slices. NeuroNexus tailors solutions per protocol rather than selling fixed configurations: selecting probe geometry for the target, choosing a package for the specific preparation, and matching the headstage and acquisition system to the rig, with Radiens for recording and analysis and Application Scientists helping match probes to each setup. When no catalog geometry fits, NeuroNexus creates custom designs using the same process (Figure 6). See Solutions for more information.

Figure 6. A NeuroNexus Matrix 3D electrode array inserted into cerebral cortex in a large-animal preparation. In this application, the Matrix array was combined with a separate ECoG thin-film grid for multi-modal and multi-scale neural recordings.

NeuroNexus Research#

NeuroNexus runs an active, peer-reviewed research program, funded by the NIH and carried out with collaborators including Harvard, Mayo Clinic, and Purdue. It serves three purposes.

1. It pushes the technology past what the catalog can do today, and the results become the next products.
2. It makes us our own most demanding customer: we run every probe, instrument, and software release first on our own benches and in our own preparations, under the conditions a lab will meet.
3. And it is the reason the company exists — the people here are neuroscientists and engineers who work on neural interfaces because the problems interest them and because the field matters, to research now and to therapies later.

See New solutions R&D and Data analytics R&D ↗ for more information.

Where to go next?#

Websites#

Both websites are new and the fastest way to understand what we make, how the pieces fit, and where we are headed.

• neuronexus.com — the company and the full catalog: probes, grids, packages, headstages, and acquisition systems, with a datasheet for every design, the glossary, the FAQ, downloads, the publication database, and this resource library. The Now page shows what we are working on.
• radiens.ai ↗ — a separate website backing the Radiens software platform: Allego and Videre apps, dashboards, downloads, and documentation. Radiens Standard is free to download, install, and use.

Use cases#

Increase your focus on the science, not the tools — learn about using advanced software ↗ and hardware tools to better support your work, with low-friction adoption into existing workflows.

Choosing an electrode — the Silicon Probes and Thin-Film Grids introduction for information on electrodes and general approaches for electrode selection; then How an Electrode Records Neural Activity for the background, Choosing an Electrode for Your Experiment and Choosing a Probe Package for the decisions, The Electrode Design Space for the full range of designs, and the interactive Design Space to filter the catalog by site count, shank geometry, and package.

Browse to learn what exists and what's possible — browse the webstore and product datasheets for designs and packages; consult the glossary for technical terms and information; learn about the latest solutions for high-density and large-scale recordings and organoid electrophysiology.

Building the rig — learn how Radiens ↗ fits into new and existing workflows to make complex work easier and reproducible; learn about cost-effective data acquisition solutions and which headstage and adapter connect to a given package.

Probe in hand — start with Silicon Probes: Setup, Handling, Cleaning and Care or Thin-Film Grid Electrodes: Setup, Handling, Cleaning and Care, then consult our large knowledge base of technical resources for training, surgical guides, troubleshooting, and advancing your work.

See your data in the moment—learn how to get the most out of every procedure with live monitoring and real-time quality metrics in Radiens software.

Looking for custom solutions — contact us with ideas and requirements for your planned or current experiments, or read about custom probe design.

Related resources#

• Silicon Probes and Thin-Film Grids: An Introduction
• NeuroNexus Probe Technology: Questions and Answers
• What Makes a Thin-Film Electrode Good
• Thin-Film Grids for Surface Recording
• Choosing an Electrode for Your Experiment · Choosing a Probe Package
• NeuroNexus Data Acquisition Systems: Platform Overview
• A Brief History of Electrode Technology
• Radiens software platform ↗

Citations#

1. Wise, K. D., Angell, J. B., & Starr, A. (1970). An integrated-circuit approach to extracellular microelectrodes. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 17(3), 238–247. DOI: 10.1109/TBME.1970.4502738 ↗
2. Najafi, K., Wise, K. D., & Mochizuki, T. (1985). A high-yield IC-compatible multichannel recording array. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 32(7), 1206–1211. DOI: 10.1109/T-ED.1985.22102 ↗
3. Buzsáki, G. (2004). Large-scale recording of neuronal ensembles. Nature Neuroscience, 7(5), 446–451. DOI: 10.1038/nn1233 ↗
4. Vetter, R. J., et al. (2004). Chronic neural recording using silicon-substrate microelectrode arrays implanted in cerebral cortex. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 51(6), 896–904. DOI: 10.1109/TBME.2004.826680 ↗
5. Angotzi, G. N., et al. (2019). SiNAPS: An implantable active pixel sensor CMOS-probe for simultaneous large-scale neural recordings. Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 126, 355–364. DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2018.10.032 ↗
6. Van De Poll, M. N., & van Swinderen, B. (2025). Long-term multichannel recordings in Drosophila flies reveal altered predictive processing during sleep compared with wake. Journal of Experimental Biology, 228(11), jeb250165. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.250165 ↗
7. Perich, M. G., et al. (2026). Inferring brain-wide interactions using data-constrained recurrent neural network models. Neuron. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2026.07.016 ↗