We’ve closed a $230 million Series C financing with participation from Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Y Combinator, IQT, and Quiet Capital, all pre-existing investors in Science, among others. The deal was oversubscribed with demand in excess of our capital needs, and brings the total capital invested into the company to approximately $490 million since our founding in 2021.
This capital enables us to fully see through the commercialization of our brain-computer interface (BCI) retinal implant, PRIMA, as well as advance our other core pipeline programs into the clinic. In clinical trials, PRIMA was the only treatment to successfully restore form vision to patients blinded by late-stage macular degeneration. The PRIMA trial results were featured in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and on the cover of Time.
Beyond bringing PRIMA to patients in need, we are also focused on the expansion of our research, manufacturing, and operational infrastructure, from our state-of-the-art Biohybrid neural interface technology and Vessel perfusion platform to our growing MEMS Foundry and BCI Ecosystem businesses.
With the expected upcoming commercial launch of PRIMA in Europe, we will be the first BCI company with a vision restoration product in the market. We have rapidly emerged as a leading neural engineering company, with a growing portfolio designed to address significant unmet clinical needs while advancing the frontier of BCIs. The Series C round comes amid strong investor demand, reflecting confidence in our scientific depth, executive leadership, and long-term vision to shape the future of medicine.
“There is a profound sense in which the brain is the ultimate central object of medicine: it is the only organ which is not, even in principle, transplantable, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that engaging with it directly as an information processing system facilitates extraordinary effect sizes,” said Max Hodak, cofounder and CEO of Science. “We are deeply committed to research and new technologies that can provide treatment options where none existed before to drive fundamental improvements in the human condition.”
“The strength and caliber of this syndicate reflects both the urgency of the problems we are addressing and the credibility of our execution so far,” said Darius Shahida, Science’s Chief Strategy Officer. “With this capital, we are focused on commercialization and delivering real-world clinical impact. Our imperative is to become the first BCI company to scale and achieve profitability.”
We’re also expanding our PRIMA clinical trial program to include other retinal diseases, such as Stargardt disease and retinitis pigmentosa. These conditions are the leading causes of inherited retinal vision loss in young adults, affecting 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 4,000 people, respectively. The initial trials will be conducted by Dr. Matthew Simunovic, MB BChir, PhD, a leader in the field of retinal disease therapy and pioneer in early prosthetic vision research, at the Sydney Eye Hospital in Australia.
Results from our earlier landmark PRIMA clinical trial in Europe demonstrated that the implant could restore functional central vision, effectively working as artificial photoreceptors in the retina. The trial evaluated the PRIMA system in 38 blinded patients with advanced dry age-related macular degeneration. The peer-reviewed original paper published by the NEJM showed that 80% of patients demonstrated meaningful improvement of visual acuity and were able to read letters, numbers, and words.
Following these unprecedented results, we have submitted a CE mark application to the European Union. In parallel, we have applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for regulatory approval.
