The Biological Computing Co. (TBC) Secures $25 Million Seed Round, First to Deploy Neuron-Based Alternative to Silicon AI

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Feb 12, 2026, 07:00 ET

Funding accelerates deployment of biological computing systems as co-founders open flagship San Francisco lab

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Biological Computing Co. (TBC), the company redefining computing for the post-silicon AI era, today launched a new class of compute that integrates living neurons with modern AI, becoming the first to deploy applied biological computing for computer vision, generative video, and AI infrastructure. The launch includes a $25 million seed round led by Primary, and coincides with the opening of TBC's flagship lab in San Francisco's Mission Bay to support customer deployment.

Formerly Biological Black Box (BBB), TBC connects living neurons with modern AI to make frontier models more stable, scalable, and efficient. The company's neural-based solution integrates directly with foundation models to improve performance while reducing compute cost, reflecting a belief that the future of high-performance computing will increasingly incorporate real biology.

"While silicon has carried the field far, AI's next breakthrough will come from alternative architectures like biological computing," said Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi of Primary Ventures. "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."

The perfect storm driving low-power biocomputing

TBC was founded at the intersection of three global forces: breakthroughs in neuroscience, growing constraints of today's AI systems, and an accelerating climate and energy crisis. Today's dominant architectures rely heavily on brute-force scaling and repeated optimization cycles. These approaches have become increasingly expensive and difficult to sustain as systems move beyond static training, exposing the need for new computing paradigms that prioritize efficiency, stability, and reliability.

"The pinnacle of performant compute will closely resemble the brain in more ways than we can imagine," said Scott Belsky, partner at A24 and previous chief of strategy at Adobe. "TBC is pursuing a north star that I believe is the most promising direction to explore the future of computing."

From living neurons to deployable AI

TBC's neuroscience and engineering team encodes real-world data (e.g., images, video) into living neurons, then decodes neural activity into richer representations mapped onto state-of-the-art AI models through modular adapters. In parallel, TBC's Algorithm Discovery platform applies biologically derived principles to inform new AI system design beyond transformers, creating a compute layer that strengthens existing architectures rather than replacing them.

"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," noted Tim Gardner, co-founder of Neuralink.

Believing that better computers require a revolution in computing itself, TBC co-founders Alex Ksendsovsky, MD, PhD, and Jon Pomeraniec, MD, MBA, both neurosurgeon-neuroscientists, are establishing a new computing category where biological networks complement silicon to unlock new performance and efficiency capabilities across modern AI systems – demonstrating scalable quality gains that are critical for real-world products operating under tight energy constraints.

"Using the real brain for computing is paradoxically the most elusive yet the most obvious idea in the field of computer science," says Ksendzovsky. "We're at the ground level of paradigm shift, of what comes next, after language, after silicon," Pomeraniec added. "We're building infrastructure to understand and interact with the world in a fundamentally new way."

Interested AI researchers, neuroscientists, investors, and partners can request more information at www.tbc.co.

About The Biological Computing Co.
Based in San Francisco, The Biological Computing Co. (TBC) is harnessing evolutionary intelligence to redefine computing. Our platform integrates living neurons with advanced AI, creating frontier models that are more stable, scalable, and dramatically more efficient for applications including AI processing and real-time adaptive learning. Founded by a team of neurosurgeon-scientists, biologists, and engineers with expertise in neuroscience, machine learning, computer vision, and AI, TBC is engineering the future of biocompute.