Alex Ksendzovsky and Jon Pomeraniec were in a Washington, D.C. Airbnb, but they weren’t on vacation. They were feeding stock market data into a dish of living brain cells.
It was 2021, and the two neurosurgeons were testing Ksendzovsky’s far-fetched college idea: that brain cells could predict the S&P 500. They encoded daily prices into electrical patterns and fed those patterns into a dish filled with living neurons. Then they watched. The neurons didn’t just respond—they recognized patterns in the data. What started as a wild experiment revealed something bigger: that living neurons could be used as a form of compute.
“It was the first proof point,” said Pomeraniec. “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. And there was no turning back.”
Five years later, Ksendzovsky and Pomeraniec’s The Biological Computing Co. (TBC) has raised $25 million in seed funding, Fortune has learned. Primary led the round, with participation from Builders VC, E1 Ventures, Proximity, Refactor Capital, Tusk Ventures, and Wonder Ventures. The startup’s goal is as simple as it’s futuristic: To position biological computing as a genuine alternative to silicon and transformers.
