A chip smaller than a grain of rice just gave people their sight back.
And it's now legal to sell across 30 European countries.
Meet PRIMA — an implant from Science Corp that restores vision lost to age-related macular degeneration, the disease that quietly steals reading, faces, and independence from millions of older adults worldwide.
The company just won EU approval.
Germany gets the first real-world patients as early as this September.
Here's the wild part.
An hour-long outpatient surgery places the tiny chip behind the eye.
Then patients wear camera glasses that beam what they see straight to the implant.
The brain does the rest.
In the trial published by the New England Journal of Medicine, 84% of patients could read letters, numbers, and words again.
That's not incremental. That's life restored.
Sort of.
Science Corp's founder, Max Hodak, co-founded Neuralink with Elon Musk — then left in 2021 to build his own brain-computer interface company.
But Hodak learned something the hard way.
Moonshot science needs a cash engine first.
"There's this risk that the whole thing enters a winter," Hodak said. So instead of chasing headlines, his team bought a French vision-tech company, Pixium, in 2024 — and turned PRIMA into the business that pays the bills.
Each device could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Steep. But Science Corp just raised $230 million to scale this and its next act — a bio-hybrid brain sensor, developed with Yale's neurosurgery chair.
Vision restoration isn't the finish line.
It's the funding.
And the real ambition — decoding the brain itself — is just getting warmed up.
That's all for now!
