Science Corp is preparing to place its first brain sensor in a human, betting biology will beat electrodes

Science Corporation, the BCI company founded by ex-Neuralink president Max Hodak, is preparing to place a pea-sized, 520-electrode sensor on a human brain’s surface during already-scheduled surgery. Yale neurosurgery chair Murat Günel will lead the programme; trials could begin in 2027. The company also has PRIMA, a retinal implant that restored vision in 38 patients (NEJM-published), with CE mark approval expected mid-2026. Science Corp raised $230M Series C at a $1.5B valuation ($490M total) and employs 150 people.

Science Corporation, the brain-computer interface company founded by former Neuralink president Max Hodak, is preparing to place its first sensor inside a human skull. The device,  a pea-sized chip packed with 520 recording electrodes, will not be pushed into brain tissue like Neuralink’s implant. Instead, it will rest on top of the cortex, recording neural activity from the surface while a neurosurgeon is already operating for an unrelated condition. If everything goes to plan, the first placement could happen in a patient who needs brain surgery for a stroke.

The man who will perform that surgery is Murat Günel, chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine and neurosurgeon-in-chief of Yale New Haven Health. Science Corp appointed Günel as its medical director for brain-computer interfaces at the end of March, following two years of discussions with Hodak. His task is to develop the clinical and surgical programme for the company’s biohybrid BCI project, starting with the first human sensor placement.

Günel’s approach is deliberately opportunistic. Rather than recruiting patients specifically for a brain-computer interface trial, the plan is to identify people who already require significant cranial surgery, stroke victims, for instance, who need a craniectomy to relieve swelling. With the skull already open and the brain exposed, placing a small sensor on the cortical surface adds minimal additional risk and time. Günel expects to evaluate the device’s safety and its ability to record brain activity in these initial cases.

The biohybrid gambit

What makes Science Corp’s technology unusual in a field crowded with electrode arrays is what comes after the sensor. The company’s long-term vision is a biohybrid neural interface: a device embedded with lab-grown neurons that are genetically modified with light-sensitive proteins. Micro-LEDs on the chip trigger those neurons to fire, and nearby recording electrodes detect the activity. The lab-grown neurons are designed to integrate naturally with the patient’s own brain cells over time, forming a biological bridge between electronics and neural tissue.

The first human placement will not include the biohybrid components. It is a recording-only device, intended to prove that the sensor can safely sit on the brain’s surface and capture meaningful signals. But the architecture is built to accommodate the biological layer later, which is what distinguishes Science Corp from every other company in the BCI space. Where Neuralink, Paradromics, and Synchron are refining how electrodes interact with neurons, Science Corp wants to grow new neurons that speak both languages, biological and electronic, natively.

Science Corp says it does not plan to seek FDA approval for these initial sensor placements, arguing that the tiny device poses no significant risk to patients who are already undergoing major brain surgery. Instead, the company will work through institutional review boards, the ethics committees that oversee human research at academic medical centres. Günel is already in discussions with the relevant boards, though he describes a timeline of beginning trials in 2027 as “optimistic.”

From eyes to brains

The brain sensor represents Science Corp’s second front. The company’s more advanced programme is PRIMA, a retinal implant designed to restore vision in patients with geographic atrophy caused by age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness. Results published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 2025 showed that 38 patients across 17 clinical sites in five countries gained an average improvement of 25.5 letters, more than five lines on a standard eye chart, after 12 months. Eighty-four per cent of patients could read letters, numbers, and words. An accompanying NEJM editorial called PRIMA “the first treatment to restore vision” in patients with advanced geographic atrophy.

The PRIMA implant is a 2mm-by-2mm photovoltaic chip, roughly 30 micrometres thick,  half the width of a human hair, that sits beneath the retina and is powered wirelessly by specialised glasses projecting near-infrared light. It has FDA breakthrough device designation, and Science Corp has submitted a CE mark application to the European Union, expecting approval by mid-2026.

The company closed a $230 million Series C in March 2026, led by Lightspeed, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Quiet Capital, and IQT, the strategic investment arm of the intelligence community. The round valued Science Corp at $1.5 billion, bringing total funding to $490 million. The company employs 150 people.

A crowded field with different bets

Science Corp enters human brain trials as the BCI sector accelerates. Neuralink, which Hodak co-founded before leaving in 2021, has implanted its N1 device in over 20 patients and recently expanded trials to the UK, where a patient at University College London Hospital controlled a computer within hours of surgery. The company has begun planning for high-volume production and automated surgical procedures in 2026.

Paradromics, which received FDA investigational device exemption approval for its Connexus system in late 2025, claims an information transfer rate exceeding 200 bits per second,  more than 20 times faster than Neuralink’s initial reported performance. Its target is speech restoration for people with severe paralysis. Synchron has taken a less invasive route entirely, deploying its Stentrode device through blood vessels rather than requiring open brain surgery, with more than 50 patients implanted and a demonstration of an ALS patient controlling an iPad by thought alone.

Each company is making a fundamentally different technical bet. Neuralink is optimising for electrode density and surgical automation. Paradromics is pursuing raw bandwidth. Synchron is trading signal quality for surgical simplicity. Science Corp is betting that biology itself, lab-grown neurons that fuse with the brain, will eventually outperform all of them.

That bet is unproven and years from validation. The biohybrid concept has been demonstrated in laboratory settings but never in a human brain. The first sensor placement will not test the biological integration; it will test whether the hardware platform can record usable signals from the cortical surface without complication. From there, the path to a fully biohybrid interface, neurons and all, stretches through regulatory territory that no company has yet mapped.

Günel, who has spent decades operating on the brain, brings the kind of clinical credibility that a startup founded by a technologist needs. Hodak understands electrodes, optics, and genetically modified neurons. Günel understands the organ they are asking to accept them. Whether Science Corp’s biohybrid vision is a breakthrough or a detour will depend on how well those two forms of expertise converge in the operating room.