Six years ago at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, I asked Sam Altman how OpenAI, with its complicated corporate structure, would make money. He said that someday, he’d ask the AI. When everyone snickered, he added, “You can laugh. It’s all right. But it really is what I actually believe.” He wasn’t kidding. Sitting again in front of an audience, this time across from Max Hodak, the co-founder and CEO of Science Corp., I can’t help but remember that moment with Altman. Pale-complexioned Hodak, wearing jeans and a black zip-up sweatshirt, looks more like he’d fit in in a mosh pit than pitching a company valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. But he’s got a sly sense of humor that keeps the room engaged. Hodak started programming when he was six, and as an undergraduate at Duke, he worked his way into the lab of Miguel Nicolelis, a pioneering neuroscientist who has since become publicly critical of commercial brain-computer interface ventures. In 2016, Hodak co-founded Neuralink with Elon Musk, serving as its president and essentially running day-to-day operations until 2021. When I ask what he learned working alongside Musk, Hodak describes a specific pattern. “We got into lots of situations together where something would happen. In my mind, I’d have two diametrically opposed possible solutions, and I would bring them to him, and I’d be like, ‘Is it A or B?’ And he’d look at it and be like, ‘It’s definitely B,’ and the problem would never come back.” After a few years of this, Hodak took what he’d learned and roped in three former Neuralink colleagues to launch Science Corp. about four years ago. Like Altman, Hodak describes his team’s improbable goal so placidly that I find myself believing the limits of cognition are about to be overcome sooner than most of us realize. And that he’ll be among those who make it happen. While I’ve been consumed with the AI data center craziness and the talent poaching wars, momentum has been building in the background. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 According to World Economic Forum data, nearly 700 companies around the world have at least some ties to brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, including some tech giants. In addition to Neuralink, Microsoft Research has run a dedicated BCI project for the last seven years. Apple partnered earlier this year with Synchron, backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, to create a protocol that lets BCIs control iPhones and iPads. Even Altman is reportedly helping to stand up a Neuralink rival. And in August, China released its “Implementation Plan for Promoting Innovation and Development of the BCI Industry,” targeting core technological breakthroughs by 2027, and aiming to become the global leader by 2030. Much of the neuroscience isn’t new. “A legitimate criticism of the BCI companies is that they aren’t doing new neuroscience,” Hodak said. “Decoding cursor control or robotic arm control from a human — people have been doing that for 30 years.” What’s new, however, is the engineering. “The innovation at Neuralink is making [a device] small enough and low-power enough that you can fully implant it and close the skin, and have something that isn’t an infection risk. That genuinely was new.” Indeed, Hodak admits we’re missing a lot of information about how the brain works to really build the products that he’s talking about. But unlike a lot of BCI companies that have to raise money, Science Corp. — which has so far secured $260 million — is figuring out ways to generate revenue. On a small scale, it makes tools that it then sells to other researchers — as Hodak puts it, “taking a $300,000 cart-sized recording system and turning it into a $2,000 handheld.” The bigger unlock is getting something to market soon. A product that can help people and make money while the company quietly builds technology that it claims could reshape human consciousness itself. That initial commercial “product” is a procedure called Prima. It’s exciting enough that Time magazine put the tech on its cover a few weeks ago: a computer chip smaller than a grain of rice that’s implanted directly in the retina. Combined with camera-equipped glasses and (for the time being) a two-pound battery, the tech restores vision to people with advanced macular degeneration. Not blurry, vague light perception, but “form vision.” In completed clinical trials with 38 patients, Science Corp. says 80% were able to read again, two letters at a time. “To my knowledge, this is the first time that restoration of the ability to fluently read has ever been definitively shown in blind patients,” says Hodak. Science Corp. can only take so much credit. It acquired Prima from a French company called Pixium Vision last year, refined the technology, completed the trials Pixium had started, and submitted the results for approval in Europe. Hodak expects to launch the product