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Founder Spotlight: Max Hodak and Science Corp

Duke Capital Partners Founder Spotlight

Max Hodak

Founder & CEO, Science Corporation  |  Co-founder, Neuralink  |  Duke BME ’12  |  DCP Portfolio Founder

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“Restore and extend life by transcending the limits of biology.”

Max Hodak (Duke BME ’12) has never taken the conventional route. As a student, he joined Duke’s prestigious neuroscience research ecosystem — typically reserved for graduate students — while commuting between Durham and Silicon Valley, starting companies and immersing himself in the San Francisco ecosystem.

In 2021, Max co-founded Science Corporation to restore and extend life by transcending the limits of biology. Science developed the first treatment ever demonstrated in clinical trials to restore functional central vision in patients blinded by advanced macular degeneration — a result published in The New England Journal of Medicine and featured on the cover of TIME. In 2016, he co-founded Neuralink, where he served as President. Prior to Neuralink, Max founded two other companies: MyFit, a predictive college admissions platform, and Transcriptic, a robotic cloud laboratory for biology.

We sat down with Max to learn how Duke shaped his trajectory, what he learned building at the frontier, and what he’d share with the Duke community on turning ambition into action.

How did your experience at Duke shape your early focus on neuroscience and brain-computer interfaces?

Max arrived at Duke with a deep interest in the brain. The university provided the infrastructure and ability to pursue his interest seriously and early. Through his dedication, he was admitted to Professor Miguel Nicolelis’s neuroscience lab, an environment that allowed him to engage directly with cutting-edge neural interface research.

Duke also provided the flexibility to spend significant time in the lab while continuing to build outside the classroom.

I came in interested — way before college. Getting into that lab was the thing. Classes were like the least important part to me personally. They let me work there as long as I was enrolled, so I made it work.

While at Duke, you built companies and commuted regularly between school and Silicon Valley. What did your early exposure to Silicon Valley teach you that a more conventional path might not have?

What I learned from the experience was calibration — and getting integrated into the Silicon Valley community early on. Being embedded early in a network where exceptional ambition was treated as normal permanently shifted what I believed was possible for myself.

After two years, Max took a leave of absence to run a web company he started while in high school, which was quickly acquired. He re-enrolled and began commuting between Durham and Silicon Valley, booking overnight flights to maximize working hours in transit. He became part of the Blake Byers (Duke and Stanford alum) network, who hosted a number of students and early-stage founders during this period. The companies that passed through have since been valued collectively at over $15 billion.

What did founding your first two companies, MyFit and Transcriptic, teach you?

Max ran Transcriptic for six years, growing it to millions in ARR and establishing a major Eli Lilly partnership. The biggest lessons had little to do with the technology, and everything to do with the human side of building organizations.

The things that make a company difficult have very little to do with the technology working. It is mostly about organizing people and reasoning under extraordinary uncertainty that persists for very long time horizons.

He came to believe that Silicon Valley’s best operating knowledge is a spoken tradition — passed through specific companies and individuals, like PayPal to Apple to the firms that inherited those cultures. Not having come up through one of those lineages first, he rediscovered many of those lessons the hard way. By 2017, Max had departed Transcriptic and later co-founded Neuralink, where he would serve as President for four and a half years.

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Can you walk us through the origin story of Science Corp? How do you see the BCI industry evolving?

Science emerged from a convergence of timing, capability, and a clear thesis Max had about the future of healthcare innovation. After nearly five years at Neuralink, Max left with a clear conviction: the tools to build something meaningfully were finally within reach. In 2021, he founded Science Corporation.

A defining early move was Science’s acquisition of assets from Pixium Vision SA, a Paris-based company with a breakthrough retinal implant technology but which had encountered significant financial difficulty. Where others saw a distressed asset, Max saw the scientific and clinical foundation of something important. That judgment has since been validated. Science’s PRIMA retinal implant — the technology derived from that acquisition — was the subject of an original article in The New England Journal of Medicine, featured on the cover of TIME, and has been submitted for regulatory approval in both Europe and the United States.

Max sees the current moment in neural engineering as transformative. The field has changed almost beyond recognition in just a few years: it is now a real industrial effort, with multiple well-funded groups pursuing different research and product directions, new devices reaching patients, and basic research opening doors that didn’t previously exist. Artificial intelligence, in particular, is accelerating progress in ways that were inconceivable not long ago — expanding the toolbox and creating opportunities to reshape treatment of conditions ranging from oncology to neurodegeneration.

Neural engineering is a category of healthcare technology — like pharma. There will be platform vendors, tool providers, and a couple of big ecosystems. I think ours will be one of those. And then there are end applications, with some giant vertically integrated companies and a bunch of smaller ones.

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How do you think about Science’s responsibility to patients once a device is implanted?

For Max, the answer lies in the hardware itself. Science is deliberately building patient-protective principles into its technical architecture from the ground up.

It is very important to us that if a patient has an implant, it belongs to the patient — not the manufacturer, not an insurer. It must work offline. It must not have a subscription. Those are contrarian views that we’re building directly into the architecture of our systems.

What advice do you have for Duke students thinking about joining or founding a startup?

Before founding a company, he argues, the single most valuable investment is working inside an organization whose culture you would most want to replicate, to develop organizational instinct. Learn how decisions get made about people. Learn how information actually moves. Learn how meetings work.

Silicon Valley is a very small place. You’ve got to get into that network. The best way to do that is typically to work for someone first. I was one of those really ambitious twenty-one-year-olds who was like, I’m going to start my own company and make it big. I kind of did it, but it was certainly way more difficult than it needed to be.

The same logic applies to building a team. The people you want to hire are already at the best companies. Joining those companies first means that when the moment to found arrives, the talent relationships, investor networks, and institutional credibility are already established.

Getting that from working in the network is the only way to do it — and it does not need to be that painful.

For those earlier in their careers, Max points to two capabilities that matter most beyond deep subject-matter expertise: strong computational fluency — comfort with code, command line, and modern datasets — and the communication skills required to explain to the world why the work is worth doing. The latter, he argues, is increasingly urgent. The scientific industry is losing the public, for whom technical progress can seem either irrelevant to daily life or actively threatening. The raw results are no longer enough. Founders and scientists alike need to paint a picture of a compelling future, bring society along, and — in translational fields — see their work all the way through to real-world impact, not just publications.

Max represents what sustained intellectual focus, early network integration, and a willingness to build through uncertainty can produce. Science is now among the most consequential companies in neural engineering, and its most significant work remains ahead.

Duke Capital Partners is proud to support Max and the Science team, and to help make that story legible to the next generation of Duke founders who are still writing theirs.