The Biological Computing Company (TBC) is ready to tell the world what they’re building. Founders Alex Ksendzovsky, CEO, and Jon Pomeraniec, COO, have led the company to use living neural networks to develop and optimize AI architectures in a commercial setting. This investment pushed the boundaries of our compute thesis for three reasons: one, Alex and Jon live in that founder sweet spot of brilliant, on a mission, and wildly different; two, their tangible results are the stuff of sci-fi but very real; and three, it’s exactly what we’re looking for — the belief that radical breakthroughs in compute are needed to meet AI’s demand for efficiency, performance, and scalability and that outlier founders with perspectives born of unique life experiences will build that future.
To understand TBC from first principles, we start with the fact that the brain is a million times more energy efficient than the best silicon today. It operates on roughly 20 watts of power to deliver an exaflop of computational power. You’d need 120K watts of power for NVIDIA’s Blackwell to deliver the same throughput.
For decades, neuroscientists have tried to translate the brain's functionality into digital systems. What if, instead of translating the brain, we let neurons compute on their own? If we can harness the computing power nature intrinsically provides us, we can unlock capabilities that silicon alone cannot.
These facts have been driving Alex and Jon for two decades. In the early 2000s, Alex was studying philosophy of mind in college and saw a visiting professor demo a robot powered by a neuron. He immediately intuited the potential to extract the immense power of the brain for computation. Since then, Alex and cofounder Jon – both neurosurgeons from UMD and Penn – have had a decades-long partnership through medical school, surgery roles, and research positions. After making rapid progress in their research around the brain’s computing capabilities in 2021, as covered by Fortune’s Term Sheet, they started The Biological Computing Company to focus on building computers for the future – out of neurons. This is not neuromorphic or “brain-inspired” chip design. This is harnessing the intrinsic and evolutionary power of the brain for compute.
The Biological Computing Company is building an organic computing platform that connects real living neurons with modern AI, making frontier models more stable, scalable and dramatically more efficient. TBC is able to harness intelligence, connecting neurons to electrodes, which then demonstrate superior efficiency to silicon for specific computational tasks. With its first product, TBC is showing a 23x retained improvement in video model efficiency – their team encodes real world data into living neurons, then decodes the neural activity into richer representations that have been mapped to state-of-the-art AI.
TBC is also using biological compute to extract principles from living neural networks, informing the development of novel AI architectures. In doing so, the company is not only augmenting today’s models, but shaping how future models will be built. This marks the first true commercialization of biological computing – and a critical step toward a world where biological and digital compute operate together.
We’re proud to have led The Biological Computing Company’s $25M Seed round, joined by Builders VC, Refactor Capital, Wonder Ventures, E1 Ventures, Proximity and Tusk Ventures. This is entirely new technology and we don’t know exactly how the market around it will develop. We believe in founders shaping the arc of history by doing something that people previously thought to be impossible. We look forward to supporting them in their journey. If you are interested in building at this frontier, TBC is hiring.
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