Beyond Neuralink: The "Strange" Max Hodak Is Building

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1 A New Frontier in the Brain-Computer Interface Race

2 The Foundation: Restoring Vision with the Prima Implant

3 The Scalability Problem: Why Electrodes Aren’t Enough

4 The Long-Term Vision: From Healing Brains to Exploring Consciousness

6 A Pragmatic Path in a Speculative Field By Max Hodak

A New Frontier in the Brain-Computer Interface Race

When Max Hodak, former president and co-founder of Neuralink, left Elon Musk’s high-profile venture, the technology world watched with bated breath. After pioneering some of the most advanced brain-computer interface (BCI) technology on the planet, where does a visionary go next? The answer, as revealed in a 2025 interview, is toward a future that is far more radical and biologically integrated. Hodak’s new company, Science Corp, is not just iterating on the Neuralink model; it is fundamentally reimagining it.

Max Hodak Is Building to Redraw the Boundaries of the Mind

Science Corp is pursuing a vision that begins with the pragmatic—restoring sight to the blind—and stretches toward the profound—potentially engineering and extending consciousness itself. With a war chest of $260 million in venture funding, the company is tackling what Hodak identifies as the core scalability problem of current BCI technology. His critique is stark: “Placing anything into the brain inevitably destroys some amount of brain tissue.” This physical limitation, he argues, creates a hard ceiling on how much information we can ever exchange with the brain using electrodes alone.

So, if you can’t perfectly connect a machine to the fragile, complex tissue of the brain, what’s the alternative? Hodak’s solution is as elegant as it is startling: build a new part of the brain out of engineered, biological components. This is the core of the “stranger” path he has chosen—a move from invasive electronics to biohybrid systems that could one day allow us to add new functions to our minds as seamlessly as our brains develop.

The Foundation: Restoring Vision with the Prima Implant

Every long-term revolution needs a near-term mission, and for Science Corp, this comes in the form of its first commercial product: the Prima retinal implant. Designed for patients suffering from advanced macular degeneration, Prima is a tiny chip, smaller than a grain of rice, that is implanted directly into the retina. It works in concert with a pair of smart glasses equipped with a camera, bypassing dead photoreceptor cells to stimulate the surviving bipolar cells underneath.

The results from early clinical studies are promising and deeply human in their impact. In trials, an impressive 80% of patients regained the ability to read, even if slowly. Hodak highlights this as a key milestone, likely the first definitive demonstration of a subretinal implant restoring fluent reading. Acquired from French firm Pixium Vision, Prima represents a strategic beachhead. It addresses a clear, devastating medical need, is on a clear regulatory pathway toward commercialization in Europe by 2026, and provides Science Corp with a vital revenue stream. At an estimated procedure cost of $200,000, the company projects it can reach profitability by treating just 50 patients per month, building a financial engine to fuel its more speculative research.

Table: Science Corp’s Technology Portfolio

Technology	Primary Function	Current Stage	Key Innovation
Prima Retinal Implant	Restore form vision and reading ability	Late-stage clinical trials; preparing for market launch	Minimally invasive, subretinal form factor
Optogenetic Gene Therapy	Make neurons sensitive to light for precise control	Pre-clinical research	Targeting the eye as a testing ground for neural control
Biohybrid “Waffle” Implant	Integrate lab-grown neurons with native brain tissue	Proof-of-concept in animal models	Biological integration, not just electrical connection

The Scalability Problem: Why Electrodes Aren’t Enough

To understand why Hodak is betting on biology, you must understand the fundamental limitation he sees in his past work at Neuralink and in the entire field of electrode-based BCIs. The brain is not a digital computer with clean input/output ports; it is a wet, delicate, and densely interconnected network. Pushing rigid electrodes into this environment causes scarring, immune response, and neural damage.

This creates what engineers call a scalability problem. You might be able to safely implant hundreds or even thousands of electrodes, but scaling to the millions or billions of connection points needed for rich, complex interaction with the brain’s roughly 86 billion neurons becomes physically impossible. The tissue damage would be catastrophic. Hodak frames this not just as an engineering hurdle, but as a philosophical dead-end for technologies that seek to deeply merge with the brain.

His alternative is a complete paradigm shift. Instead of forcing silicon to talk to neurons, Science Corp is developing a “waffle grid” implant. This device sits on the brain’s surface and contains thousands of tiny wells. Each well is seeded with specialized neurons grown in a lab from stem cells. Once implanted, the idea is that these lab-grown neurons will naturally extend their axons and dendrites—the brain’s own wiring—down into the patient’s native brain tissue, forming genuine, biological synapses.

This biohybrid approach promises several revolutionary advantages:

Massive Bandwidth: A single neuron can form thousands of synaptic connections, offering a potential connection density far beyond any electrode array.
True Biocompatibility: The connection is made of the brain’s own biological material, drastically reducing foreign-body response and scarring.
Functional Specificity: Different types of engineered neurons (sensory, motor, computational) could be grown and implanted for specific tasks.

Early proof-of-concept work in mice has shown glimmers of this potential. In experiments, mice with these light-sensitive, engineered neurons learned to associate the activation of the implant with a reward, demonstrating a functional, learned connection. However, significant challenges remain, notably a 50% survival rate of the engineered neurons after just three weeks in early tests.

The Long-Term Vision: From Healing Brains to Exploring Consciousness

While restoring vision and movement are noble and necessary goals, Hodak’s vision for Science Corp extends into a far more speculative and profound realm. He describes the company’s mission as part of a “longevity-adjacent story” focused on the brain’s two core outputs: intelligence and consciousness.

We have already succeeded, in a sense, in making intelligence substrate-independent. The same logical function can run on biological neurons in a brain or on silicon transistors in a computer chip. But consciousness—subjective, first-person experience—remains a total mystery. It is the “binding problem”: how do billions of discrete, firing neurons give rise to a single, unified sense of self and awareness?

Hodak believes that to solve this, we need more than theories; we need new kinds of observational tools. Ultra-high-bandwidth brain interfaces, of the kind Science Corp’s biohybrid technology might enable, could become the microscopes for studying consciousness. “In order to prove a theory of consciousness is right,” Hodak suggests, “you have to see it for yourself.”

This line of thinking leads to breathtaking, if disquieting, possibilities. If we begin to understand the “rules” or “physical laws” that give rise to consciousness from neural circuits, could we then engineer it? Could we redraw the boundary of a single mind? Hodak speculates about technologies that could allow two brain hemispheres to function as a single conscious entity, or that could seamlessly integrate an external computational device into the subjective self. He even muses on whether this could create deeper forms of human partnership or connection. This is no longer just medical technology; it is a venture into the foundational questions of human identity.

Navigating the Ethical Labyrinth

The ethical implications of this work are as vast as the technological ambitions. Moving from treating disease to augmenting ability and exploring the nature of consciousness triggers deep philosophical and societal questions:

Identity and Autonomy: If a person’s brain is integrated with lab-grown neurons or connected to another mind, where does the “self” reside? Who is in control?
Equity and Access: Will these technologies, likely astronomically expensive at first, create an unbridgeable gap between the “enhanced” and the “natural”?
Consent and Agency: How can informed consent be managed for procedures that might fundamentally alter a person’s perception or sense of self?
The “Hive Mind” Fear: While Hodak discusses deeper partnership, the specter of coercive collective consciousness or loss of individuality looms large in the public imagination.

Science Corp operates in a global context where these questions are not just academic. China, for instance, has explicitly stated its goal to lead the world in BCI technology by 2030, integrating it into national strategy. The race is not only technological but also geopolitical, with different cultures and governance systems applying different ethical frameworks. Navigating this will require unprecedented collaboration between scientists, ethicists, regulators, and the public.

A Pragmatic Path in a Speculative Field By Max Hodak

What makes Science Corp particularly noteworthy is its disciplined, two-track approach. Unlike purely research-driven moonshots, the company is building a viable business. The Prima implant is its near-term focus, designed to generate revenue, achieve regulatory approval, and, most importantly, help people in tangible ways right now. This success builds the capital, credibility, and surgical expertise necessary for the long-term biohybrid research.

This pragmatic staging is wise. The field of neurotechnology is littered with grand promises that failed to materialize. By focusing first on the eye—an “immune-privileged” site that is more accessible and less hostile to implants than the brain itself—Science Corp can refine its core technologies of optogenetics and biological integration in a slightly simpler environment.

The road ahead is exceedingly long. The jump from demonstrating neuron survival in a mouse to creating a stable, functional, and safe biohybrid module in a human brain is a monumental challenge that could take decades, if it is possible at all. Yet, the direction is clear. Max Hodak and Science Corp are betting that the future of merging human and machine intelligence is not about building better metal wires to poke into our biology. It is about learning the language of biology itself and using it to write new functions into the most complex system in the known universe: the human brain. In doing so, they are not just building a company; they are gently probing the very boundaries of what it means to be human.