Hon Weng Chong is Co-Founder and CEO at Cortical Labs, a biological computing company that combines lab-grown human neurons with silicon chips to create Synthetic Biological Intelligence. He is a licensed medical doctor and full-stack software engineer bridging biology and computer science.

Hon studied medicine at The University of Melbourne with a research fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, and previously founded CliniCloud, a medtech startup backed by Tencent and Ping An that won the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup. He was named Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2016.

Hon pioneered DishBrain technology, which taught 800,000 neurons to play Pong in 2021, demonstrating learning within five minutes and publishing groundbreaking research in the journal Neuron. His work applies the Free Energy Principle to biological intelligence.

Cortical Labs raised $11.6M in Series A funding led by Horizons Ventures, with backing from Blackbird Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and others. The company launched CL1, the world's first commercial biological computer in 2025, priced at $35,000 per unit.

Cortical Labs is pioneering biological computing that uses a fraction of the energy of traditional AI while eliminating animal testing for pharmaceutical research. The technology enables drug discovery applications and represents a new paradigm in computing beyond silicon.