Okay, this one genuinely caught me off guard. [The Biological Computing Co.](https://www.tbc.co/) — or TBC — just came out of stealth with a $25 million seed round and what might be the wildest pitch in AI right now: using lab-grown living neurons as a compute layer for frontier AI models. Not simulated neurons. Not “brain-inspired” architectures. Actual, biological, firing-and-signaling neurons sitting on electrode grids in a lab in San Francisco’s Mission Bay.
The backstory is almost too good. Co-founders Alex Ksendzovsky and Jon Pomeraniec are both practicing neurosurgeons who, back in 2021, rented an Airbnb in D.C. and fed stock market data into a dish of living brain cells to see if they could predict the S&P 500. The neurons started recognizing patterns. As [Fortune reported](https://fortune.com/2026/02/11/two-neurosurgeons-raised-25-million-betting-brain-cells-can-someday-outcompute-silicon/), that wild experiment planted the seed for what would become TBC — formerly known as Biological Black Box.
So how does it actually work? TBC grows neurons on grids of electrodes, then encodes real-world data — images, video, text — into electrical stimulation patterns that the neurons can process. The neurons fire, interact, and produce response patterns, which TBC then decodes into rich representations and maps onto existing AI models through modular adapters. Think of it less as replacing transformers and more as bolting a biological co-processor onto them. Pomeraniec put it well: “We could actually take information from the real world, translate it into a communicable language with biology, put it into a dish full of living neurons, draw something out, and analyze it.”
The claimed benefits are interesting: lower compute costs, better pattern extraction from fewer examples, and continuous learning without massive retraining cycles. Ksendzovsky likes to point out that the human brain is “billions of times more energy efficient than silicon,” and while TBC’s current platform isn’t quite there yet, they’re targeting hybrid neuro-silicon cloud clusters by 2027.
The $25M seed round was led by Primary Ventures, with Builders VC, E1 Ventures, Proximity, Refactor Capital, Tusk Ventures, and Wonder Ventures also participating. The news broke across [SiliconANGLE](https://siliconangle.com/2026/02/12/ai-startup-biological-computing-co-raises-25m-swap-silicon-living-lab-grown-neurons/), [PR Newswire](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-biological-computing-co-tbc-secures-25-million-seed-round-first-to-deploy-neuron-based-alternative-to-silicon-ai-302685429.html), and Fortune on February 12, 2026, and it’s been getting a lot of attention for obvious reasons.
I’ll be honest — I have no idea if biological computing will scale to the point where it meaningfully competes with silicon. But the fact that two neurosurgeons turned a late-night brain-cell experiment into a funded commercial platform with real demos in computer vision and generative video? That’s the kind of bet worth watching closely.
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