Brian
Hotchkiss

Bexorg keeps a human brain alive on a loop of artificial blood, recording cellular activity in fully mature, intact tissue for hours. That is the product. Brian Hotchkiss is the person whose job is to make that fundable, partnerable, and eventually a medicine. As Chief Business Officer, he carries the company's strategy into the rooms where science either becomes a business or stays a paper in Nature.

Bexorg spun out of Yale, from the labs of Zvonimir Vrselja and Nenad Sestan, whose research recovered cellular function in brains hours after death and stunned the field. The company's tagline is blunt: "Decode the brain, build the future." Its ambition is blunter still - a world free of brain disease. Hotchkiss sits on the executive team alongside Vrselja, who serves as CEO, and a roster of scientists building what Bexorg calls the first integrated AI and whole-human-brain platform for central nervous system drug discovery.

He arrived in 2024, placed by Park Square Executive Search, which framed him as "a seasoned business development and strategy executive whose background spans leading pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurial biotechs." The phrase undersells the through-line. Hotchkiss has spent a career attaching himself to science other people consider too early, too strange, or too risky - and then building the commercial case that makes it real.

Before Bexorg, he was Chief Business Officer at Protego Biopharma. Before that, he spent nearly seven years at Stealth BioTherapeutics, climbing through roles of increasing responsibility while helping shape corporate strategy and drive transactions. That stretch coincided with one of Stealth's defining moments: a collaboration with Alexion on elamipretide, the company's late-stage mitochondrial program. Alexion paid Stealth $30 million up front for an option to co-develop, a deal that reshaped the smaller company's trajectory. Hotchkiss was part of the business machinery behind that era.

Earlier still came senior business development roles at Ember Therapeutics and at Pfizer - the kind of pedigree that teaches a person how big pharma actually decides to write a check, and how a small biotech has to talk to get one written. He has stood on both sides of that table.

What makes the resume genuinely unusual is the academic backbone underneath it. Hotchkiss started as a chemical engineer, earning a B.S. at Cornell and then an M.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Iowa. Two engineering degrees before a single biology class. He then added an M.S. in Biology at Brown University and an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. Engineering, life science, business - he collected the full stack, one hard classroom at a time.

That sequence is the whole story in miniature. Chemical engineering trains you to think in systems, flows, and constraints - useful when your company's core technology is, quite literally, a perfusion system pushing artificial blood through brain tissue. Biology gives him the vocabulary of the lab. The MBA gives him the vocabulary of the deal. Bexorg needed someone who could stand in a room with neuroscientists and translate their breakthrough into something an investor or a pharma partner could underwrite. Few people are built to do that. Hotchkiss spent two decades and four degrees becoming one of them.

The platform he now represents, sometimes referred to as BrainEx, is pitched as the only technology of its kind capable of identifying, de-risking, and advancing next-generation CNS treatments in actual human brain tissue rather than cell cultures or organoids. CNS drug discovery has one of the ugliest failure rates in all of medicine, in large part because mice and dishes are poor stand-ins for the human brain. Bexorg's bet is that a real, intact, recording brain changes those odds. Hotchkiss's bet is that he can convince the market of the same.

The capital is following. Bexorg's backers include Engine Ventures, Amplify Partners, Starbloom Capital, Connecticut Innovations, and E1 Ventures, and the company has been associated with a Series A in the range of $23 million, against total funding reported near $43 million. None of that money arrives by accident. Raising it, structuring partnerships, and plotting the path from research platform to revenue is precisely the remit of a Chief Business Officer - and precisely what Hotchkiss has spent his career learning to do.

He keeps a low public profile. There is no flood of interviews, no manifesto, no personal brand machine. What there is instead is a pattern, repeated across Pfizer, Ember, Stealth, Protego, and now Bexorg: find the science that matters, do the unglamorous work of making it investable, and let the breakthrough speak for itself. In a field where the headlines go to the surgeons and the algorithms, the person quietly building the business case is easy to miss. He is also the reason the science gets a chance to become a cure.