Joey Taylor

The thing about the future is that somebody is building it right now, usually without a press tour, usually for prize money.

Joey Taylor is building Neuromancer, a brain-computer interface. In plain words: a way for a person to connect to a computer through neural signals rather than a keyboard, using artificial intelligence to make sense of what the brain is actually saying. That technology is where a lot of medicine and accessibility is heading, and the question of who is in the room while it is designed is not a small one.

It matters who builds an interface to a human brain. It matters whose brains the training data came from. Those decisions are being made this decade, and most of the people making them do not look like the people who will live with the consequences.

He is a repeat founder out of the HBCU Founders Initiative, and he has built across AI, gaming and food tech, which is the actual shape of most founder careers and not the one the magazines print. In 2025 he won the 15,000 dollar first prize at the Better Futures competition.

Fifteen thousand dollars. Write that number down next to the 350 million dollar round a Stanford professor's chip company raised, because both of those are the same year in the same country, and the distance between them is the thing worth understanding. The money still does not know your zip code.

Because this wing is not only for people who already won. A person building a brain-computer interface off competition prizes is exactly who a magazine should be pointing at while it is still hard, and exactly who young people should be able to name.

If that is the road you want: HBCU founder programs and pitch competitions are real, non-dilutive money, meaning you keep your company. Black Tech Green Money teaches the financing vocabulary nobody teaches in a computer class, and a free local coding camp is where it starts before any of that.