The Biological Computing Co. (TBC), formerly known as Biological Black Box (BBB), said it has raised a $25 million seed round led by Primary Ventures as it launches what it describes as a new class of computing that integrates living neurons with modern AI. The company said it is the first to deploy applied biological computing for workloads spanning computer vision, generative video, and AI infrastructure.
TBC said the financing coincides with the opening of its flagship lab in San Francisco’s Mission Bay, which it plans to use to support customer deployments. The company’s premise is that combining biological networks with silicon can improve the stability, scalability, and efficiency of frontier AI systems while reducing compute costs.
TBC said its team encodes real-world data, such as images and video, into living neurons and then decodes neural activity into richer representations that can be mapped onto state-of-the-art AI models through modular adapters. In parallel, the company said its Algorithm Discovery platform applies biologically derived principles to inform the design of new AI systems beyond transformers, positioning its approach as a compute layer that strengthens existing architectures rather than replacing them.
The company said it was founded by neurosurgeon-scientists Alex Ksendzovsky and Jon Pomeraniec and is building a new computing category in which biological networks complement silicon to unlock performance and efficiency gains for modern AI systems, particularly for products operating under tight energy constraints.
KEY QUOTES
“While silicon has carried the field far, AI’s next breakthrough will come from alternative architectures like biological computing. We believe Alex, Jon and the team at TBC can deliver step-change gains for demanding workloads such as computer vision and world models, and its early progress points to a new class of AI infrastructure.”
Brian Schechter, Partner, Primary Ventures; Gaby Lorenzi, Partner, Primary Ventures
“The pinnacle of performant compute will closely resemble the brain in more ways than we can imagine. TBC is pursuing a north star that I believe is the most promising direction to explore the future of computing.”
Scott Belsky, Partner, A24; Previous Chief Of Strategy, Adobe
“Having worked at the intersection of neuroscience and AI, what excites me about TBC is that they’re not just borrowing metaphors – they’re using living neuronal cultures to discover learning rules for the next generation of AI.”
Tim Gardner, Co-Founder, Neuralink
“Using the real brain for computing is paradoxically the most elusive yet the most obvious idea in the field of computer science,”
Alex Ksendzovsky, Co-Founder, The Biological Computing Co.
“We’re at the ground level of paradigm shift, of what comes next, after language, after silicon,”
Jon Pomeraniec, Co-Founder, The Biological Computing Co.
