The brief

Analyst view

• Founded 1981 to commercialize Dr. Graeme Clark's cochlear implant research. Went public in 1995.
• Over 400,000 people globally hear via Cochlear implants or bone-anchored hearing aids.
• Nucleus Nexa (May 2026) is the first smart cochlear implant with upgradeable firmware.

Technical approach

As reported

Electrode array

Multi-channel coding

Array in the cochlea; each electrode fires at a frequency band for speech.

Sound processor

Real-time encoding

External processor captures sound, encodes it, and transmits wirelessly.

Smart chipset

Firmware upgrade

Nexa has the first chipset update in 20 years, with on-implant memory.