- Science Corporation raised $230 million in Series C funding in March 2026, reaching a $1.5 billion valuation with over $360 million raised to date.
- Max Hodak co-founded Neuralink in 2016 and served as its president before leaving in 2021 to start Science Corp weeks later.
- The company’s PRIMA retinal implant restored the ability to read in 84% of patients with age-related macular degeneration in a pivotal clinical trial published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
- Hodak was named to the Time 100 Health list of the world’s most influential leaders in health.
Science Corporation is racing to bring the first commercially available vision-restoring brain-computer interface to market. The company’s PRIMA implant — a photovoltaic chip smaller than a grain of rice — gave blind patients the ability to read again in a 38-person clinical trial, a result its founder calls unprecedented. A CE mark application is pending in the European Union, with approval expected by mid-2026.
The man behind it is Max Hodak, a 33-year-old biomedical engineer who co-founded Neuralink, walked away from it, and built a competitor that may reach patients first. His path from a college neuroscience lab to a $1.5 billion startup is a study in obsession — with one subject above all others: the human brain.
A Freshman in the Lab Where Monkeys Moved Cursors With Their Minds
Hodak grew up in New York State and enrolled at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering to study biomedical engineering. As a freshman, he talked his way into the Nicolelis Lab — one of the top neural engineering research groups in the country, typically reserved for graduate students. The lab was famous for demonstrating that primates could control robotic arms using brain signals alone.
He spent his undergraduate years immersed in brain-computer interface research, while simultaneously commuting to California for work. Over two years, he averaged 128,550 miles flown annually — shuttling between classes in North Carolina and full-time roles on the West Coast. He graduated in 2012, already certain that BCIs would define his career.
A Cloud Lab, a Y Combinator Batch, and $30 Million Before Turning 25
Before touching brains again, Hodak took a detour into laboratory automation. In 2012, fresh out of Duke, he founded Transcriptic — a robotic cloud laboratory that let researchers run biology experiments remotely through code. The pitch was radical: two postdocs with a laptop in a coffee shop should be able to run a drug company without millions in capital equipment.
”List something, run it remotely, get results back. We wanted to do for biology what AWS did for computing.” — Max Hodak
Over five years as CEO, Hodak raised over $30 million from Google Ventures, Data Collective, and others, and grew the business to millions in annual revenue. Transcriptic merged with 3Scan in 2019 and lives on today as Strateos. But by 2016, Hodak’s mind had already drifted back to the organ that fascinated him most.
Inside Neuralink: Building Brain Implants With Elon Musk
In 2016, Hodak co-founded Neuralink alongside Elon Musk and a small group of neuroscientists and engineers. He became the company’s president — the operational counterpart to Musk’s vision and capital. The goal was audacious: build a high-bandwidth, fully implantable brain-computer interface that could eventually merge human cognition with artificial intelligence.
Hodak helped take the company from a whiteboard concept to working hardware. But in May 2021, he quietly announced his departure. The reasons were never made public, though industry observers speculated about disagreements over the pace of clinical trials and strategic direction. He left without drama — and without looking back.
April 2021: Two Weeks Off, Then a New Company
Hodak founded Science Corporation in April 2021, just weeks after leaving Neuralink. The company’s mission was narrower and more immediate: restore quality of life to patients with debilitating neurological conditions, starting with blindness.
”I’ve spent most of my life trying to answer the question: what are the ultimate brain-computer interface technologies that will get us to some of what science fiction promises?” — Max Hodak
The first product, the Science Eye, combined optogenetic gene therapy with an ultradense microLED display panel implanted directly over the retina. Unlike Neuralink’s approach, it required no in-skull implant — a design choice that dramatically simplified the regulatory and surgical path.
A Chip Smaller Than a Grain of Rice That Taught Blind Patients to Read
The real breakthrough came through acquisition. In April 2024, Science Corp purchased the PRIMA retinal implant technology from Pixium Vision, a French company that had run out of money before completing its pivotal trial. Hodak finished what Pixium started.
The PRIMAvera trial enrolled 38 patients with geographic atrophy caused by age-related macular degeneration across 17 clinical sites in five countries. The results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in October 2025, were striking: 84% of patients regained the ability to read letters, numbers, and words. The mean improvement was 25.5 letters on the standard eye chart — more than five lines.
”To my knowledge, this is the first time that restoration of the ability to fluently read has ever been definitively shown in blind patients.” — Max Hodak
The Data Safety Monitoring Board recommended PRIMA for European market approval, finding that the benefits outweighed the surgical risks. Science Corp submitted a CE mark application and expects a decision by mid-2026.
$1.5 Billion Valuation and the Time 100 Health List
In March 2026, Science Corp closed a $230 million Series C at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation, bringing total funding past $360 million. The previous round — a $104 million raise led by Khosla Ventures in April 2025 — had already signaled that institutional investors viewed Science Corp as Neuralink’s most credible competitor.
Hodak was named to the Time 100 Health list of the world’s most influential leaders in health — recognition that landed not because of promises, but because of published clinical data. In an industry where most BCI companies are still running animal trials, Science Corp has human results in a top-tier medical journal.
What Comes After Sight
Hodak has said that the BCI industry needs a company generating $100 million in revenue to prove the category is real. He intends Science Corp to be that company. European commercial launch of the PRIMA system is planned for late 2026, targeting the millions of patients worldwide suffering from advanced macular degeneration.
But vision restoration is only the starting point. Science Corp’s long-term roadmap includes technologies for cognition and mobility — the full scope of what brain-computer interfaces could eventually deliver. Hodak sees the next decade as a phase transition, driven by the compounding advances in AI and neuroscience.
He is 33 years old, runs a company valued at $1.5 billion, and has already co-founded two of the most significant BCI ventures in history. The race to connect machines to the human brain has many players. Hodak is the one with clinical data showing it works.
