While the rest of Silicon Valley has been obsessed with chasing AI deals, Max Hodak, the co-founder and former president of Neuralink, has been quietly building something that might actually change people’s lives right now. His startup, Science Corporation, just announced a $230 million Series C funding round, landing a $1.25 billion post-money valuation, and the company is racing to become the first brain-computer interface company to actually get a product into patients’ hands.

The company’s main bet right now is called PRIMA, a rice grain-sized chip that gets implanted in the eye and works with camera-equipped glasses to restore functional vision to people with advanced macular degeneration. Yeah, you read that right, they’re literally giving people their sight back. Science Corp didn’t invent PRIMA from scratch; they bought the technology from a French company called Pixium Vision back in 2024, then refined it and completed clinical trials.

Here’s where things get wild: in trials with 47 patients across Europe and the U.S., 80% experienced meaningful improvement in their vision and could actually read letters, numbers, and words again. According to Hodak, this is the first time anyone has definitively shown that blind patients can fluently read with this kind of technology. The achievement was even significant enough to land PRIMA on the cover of Time magazine.

The regulatory path is moving fast too. Science Corp has already submitted a CE mark application to the European Union and expects approval by mid-2026. Germany is likely to be their first market since it has established pathways for early access to new medical technologies. If they hit that timeline, they’d be the first BCI company with an actual product available to patients. FDA discussions in the U.S. are ongoing but moving slower, as expected.

Beyond PRIMA, the fresh cash will fund some seriously ambitious research. The company is expanding PRIMA trials to include Stargardt disease and retinitis pigmentosa, inherited conditions that cause vision loss in young adults. They’re also developing a biohybrid neural interface program that grows engineered neurons onto a device that sits on the brain’s surface, plus a new business line called Vessel that’s working on organ preservation technology so organs can be transported on commercial flights instead of being stuck in hospital ICU suites.

Investors backing this round include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Quiet Capital, and even IQT, a non-profit investment firm focused on government applications. This brings Science Corp’s total funding to $490 million, and they currently have 150 employees. For a company that’s actually close to delivering medical results rather than just hype, that’s a pretty compelling reason to pay attention.