The Biological Computing Co. (TBC) has raised a $25 million seed round that coincides with its launch of the world’s first biological computing platform for computer vision and generative AI.

The funding round was led by Primary Ventures. TBC – formerly known as Biological Black Box – also announced the opening of its flagship lab in San Francisco's Mission Bay to support customer deployment.

Founded in 2022 by neurosurgeon-neuroscientists Alex Ksendsovsky and Jon Pomeraniec, the startup’s technology works by connecting living neurons with AI capabilities to make frontier models more stable, scalable, and efficient.

TBC’s neuroscience and engineering team encodes data, such as text, images, and video, into living neurons. These neurons are then decoded into more complex representations of the data and mapped onto “state-of-the-art AI models” to improve performance and enable algorithm discovery.

This approach is said to improve performance while reducing compute cost, as neurons require much less power than traditional silicon chips. The company said it reflects its belief that the future of high-performance computing will increasingly incorporate real biology.

"Using the real brain for computing is paradoxically the most elusive yet the most obvious idea in the field of computer science," said 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."