Max Hodak

Max Hodak is an entrepreneur and the founder of several companies, including Neuralink, Transcriptic, MyFit, and Science Corp. He is the former CEO of MyFit and Transcriptic and the former CTO of Inporia. As of 2023, Hodak serves as the CEO of Science Corp.

Hodak has been practicing programming since age five or six. In May 2012, he graduated from Duke University with a bachelor of science in engineering. Throughout his four years of attendance, Hodak worked as a research assistant at Duke University's Nicolelis Lab, during which he built brain-machine interfaces for monkeys. He also worked full-time in California during his first two years at the school. He averaged 128,550 miles flown between California and North Carolina in each of those years.

Hodak cofounded MyFit in January 2008 with Jason Mueller. That year, the company competed at North Carolina State University’s eGames and Duke University’s Start-up competitions under the name AcceptEdge. MyFit began as a Facebook app with the intention of gathering data and building models to reveal the likelihood of college acceptance for a high school student. It analyzed normal attributes like grade-point average and test scores. It also considered a student's online “social maps” and real-time data about their lifestyle, goals, and interests. After Hodak completed his sophomore year of college, he took a year leave of absence from school to serve as MyFit's CEO from 2009 to 2010. In that time, the company raised $1 million from New Enterprise Associates. The company was acquired by Naviance in October 2010.

Hodak is the founder and former CEO of Transcriptic. He founded the company in February 2012 after being inspired by his time as a research assistant at Duke University. Transcriptic was a scientific infrastructure company that operated a next-generation research platform. Transcriptic merged with 3Scan in 2019 and became known as Strateos.

Neuralink was founded in July 2016 by Hodak, Elon Musk, Tim Hanson, Tim Gardner, Vanessa Tolosa, Benjamin Rapoport, Paul Merolla, Dongjin Seo, and Phillip Sabes. The company develops ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces that can connect the human brain to a computer. On May 1, 2021, Hodak announced that he had left his position at Neuralink a few weeks prior. The reason for his departure was unnoted, but it was speculated that he may have quit over disagreements with cofounder Elon Musk, or was possibly fired for moving too slowly with clinical trials.

Science Corp, a brain-computer interface (BCI) company, was founded by Hodak in 2021. It operated in stealth mode until November 2022, when the company revealed its flagship product, the Science Eye. Science Corp's work is similar to Neuralink's but focuses on using the process of photonics rather than physically implanted chips in the brain. Hodak serves as Science Corp's CEO.

Hodak has invested in Mindstate Design Labs, Synex Medical, Synchron, and Glassdome.

In 2013, Hodak received the White House Champion of Change Award due to Transcriptic being the first company to raise a seed round online from a crowdsourced group of angel investors. For this, Hodak was called a “crowdfunding pioneer.” In 2015, he was named to Forbes's 30 Under 30 List.