A start-up which builds mind-reading computer interfaces is being bought out by Facebook, offering further proof of the social media giant's ambitions to forge a new kind of link between human and machine.

CTRL Labs, a New-York-based company which has raised $67m (£54m) in funding from Amazon, Spark Capital and others, has created an armband which intercepts the signals sent by users' brains to their hands in order to let them control a virtual keyboard or mouse.

Facebook confirmed on Monday that it was close to acquiring the start-up, though did not say what it is hoping to pay. US media reports suggested a price of between $500m and $1bn.

It is the latest stage of the tech giant's four-year flirtation with building technologies that can read human minds, both through in-house efforts and through funding university research into brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)

“We know there are more natural, intuitive ways to interact with devices and technology. And we want to build them,” said Facebook's vice president of augmented and virtual reality, Andrew Bosworth.

“It’s why we’ve agreed to acquire CTRL Labs. They will be joining our Facebook Reality Labs team where we hope to build this kind of technology, at scale, and get it into consumer products faster.”