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Neurotechnology company Science Corp. raised $230 million from investors to commercialize its implant for blindness and develop even more advanced brain devices.
The fundraising brings Science's valuation to $1.25 billion, including the new money, according to a person familiar with the situation, who was not authorized to speak publicly. That makes it the second-most valuable brain implant company after Neuralink, Elon Musk's startup. It's also the second-most well-funded, having raised a total of $489 million to date.
Investors have poured more than $2 billion into the six major US brain implant companies in recent years, with similar businesses in China growing quickly with government support. The money is enabling them to build computer-brain interfaces to help patients with debilitating conditions, such as letting paralyzed people control computers with their minds or blind people regain some vision. No devices are approved currently by the US Food and Drug Administration for long-term commercial use, so they're only available in clinical trials.
Science is developing the retina implant PRIMA, a chip that sits at the back of the eye and helps blind people see, with the assistance of a special pair of glasses that projects images into the eye. A study published in October in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the system improved vision in 26 of 32 patients with advanced age-related macular degeneration. The company has submitted it for regulatory review in Europe and the US.
"We haven't seen a new brain-computer interface business like this since the cochlear implant," said Max Hodak, co-founder and chief executive officer of Science. Cochlear implants allow people to hear by connecting directly to the auditory nerve and are used by hundreds of thousands of people.
Neuralink is also developing a chip to restore vision, called Blindsight, which plugs directly into the brain's visual cortex as opposed to sitting in the eye. It has not published research on its device or announced any clinical trials. The company expects the first patient to receive the Blindsight implant this year, Neuralink President DJ Seo has said.
Science raised the funds from several investors, including IQT, a venture firm created by the Central Intelligence Agency that focuses on technology with national security implications. IQT had previously disclosed it was an investor in Science, and also invested in Synchron, another brain-computer interface company. Science does not have a plan to use its technology for military or national intelligence purposes, nor has it discussed that with IQT, Hodak said.
The $230 million will be split between the commercialization of PRIMA and the development of new technologies, Hodak said. The company is also building a device that plugs into the brain using engineered neurons. Human testing should start by the end of 2027, he said.
The current version of the PRIMA implant is intended to treat an advanced form of macular degeneration, which affects between 3,000 and 6,000 people a year in the US, said Hodak, who was formerly Neuralink's president.
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, a Science investor, said he thinks health insurance companies will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the procedure.
"He's letting people see who have no hope of ever seeing again," Khosla said of Hodak. "That's pretty transformative."
The company is launching a new clinical trial to study the implant as a treatment for Stargardt disease and retinis pigmentosa. Patients with these inherited diseases start losing vision earlier in their lives compared to those with age-related macular degeneration. This feasibility study will initially enroll five patients, with two hopefully implanted by the end of June, said Frank Brodie, Science's medical director for the PRIMA program.
Science is also developing a more advanced version of PRIMA with a higher resolution that could be studied in patients with less severe vision loss.
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