The man who built Internet Explorer wants to teach AI to think on 20 watts
May 1, 2026 - 8:06 am
Thomas Reardon, who created Internet Explorer and sold neural interface startup CTRL-labs to Meta for up to $1 billion, is raising approximately $500 million for Flourish at a $2.5 billion valuation. The startup uses connectomics and neuroscience to design AI architectures that are radically more energy-efficient, targeting the architectural layer above silicon rather than building new chips. Lux Capital and GV, who backed CTRL-labs, are expected to lead the round.
Reardon has a pattern. In 1994, he created the project that became Internet Explorer, the browser that turned Microsoft from a software company into an internet company and triggered the most consequential antitrust case in technology history. In 2015, he co-founded CTRL-labs, a neural interface startup that built a wristband capable of translating electrical signals from the brain into computer commands, and sold it to Meta for somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion.
In between, he earned a PhD in neuroscience from Columbia University, served as a founding board member of the World Wide Web Consortium, and delivered the first implementation of CSS in a web browser. Now Reardon is raising approximately $500 million for Flourish, a startup that wants to make artificial intelligence radically less power-hungry by borrowing design principles from the one system that already runs intelligence efficiently: the human brain.
According to Bloomberg, the company has no commercial product, but it's backed by a strong thesis, a team of neuroscientists, and a founder with an impressive career track record.
The Problem
The AI industry’s power consumption is approaching national economy scale. In 2022, data centres, AI workloads, and related infrastructure consumed approximately 460 terawatt-hours of electricity globally. The International Energy Agency projects this will nearly double by the end of 2026, with data centres alone accounting for 3 per cent of global electricity consumption by 2030—roughly twice Germany’s current total usage.
In the United States, data centres consumed more than 4 per cent of the country’s total electricity in 2023, a figure projected to reach 9 per cent by 2030. The technology companies driving this demand are responding with supply-side solutions:
- Startups are racing to curb data centre energy use
- Meta is exploring space-based solar panels
- Microsoft has signed nuclear power agreements
- Amazon is buying entire wind farms
Collective capital expenditure on AI infrastructure from Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft alone exceeds $650 billion in 2026 guidance.
Reardon’s argument is that the industry’s answer to powering AI—building more power—is wrong, or at least incomplete. The human brain performs tasks that no AI system can match, including generalisation, abstraction, and continuous learning from minimal data.