She runs a company called Concerto. The name is not an accident - she conducts microbes the way a producer assembles a band.
Cheri, mid-orchestra · photo: William S. Dixon
Most people meet a microbe and reach for soap. Cheri Ackerman Araromi met the microbiome and reached for a screening platform. As cofounder and CEO of Concerto Biosciences, she spends her days asking a question that sounds simple and is fiendishly hard: which microbes, in which combinations, make a community thrive? The trillions of microbial cells living in and on a human body have been talking to each other for as long as humans have existed. Until recently, nobody could hear the conversation.
Concerto's answer is a device called kChip. It packs microbes into tiny droplets, mixes them in thousands of combinations, and watches who helps whom. The platform came out of Cheri's postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she worked with Professor Paul Blainey building tools to partition, recombine, and sort small volumes of liquid and gel so that combinatorial biology could run at high throughput. Where a traditional lab might test a handful of pairings, kChip reads the social network of an entire microbial community at once.
The output is not a paper. It is a product. Concerto designs microbial "ensembles" - curated teams of microbes that perform a job together - and turns them into things you can use. The first one targets the skin. The company's lead therapeutic candidate, a microbiome-modulating approach to atopic dermatitis, doesn't try to scorch the skin clean. It rebalances the ecosystem already there. One early skin product was described, memorably, as resembling yogurt: a living topical, spread on like breakfast.
"The future of medicine is about creating health through balanced ecosystems, rather than treating disease by killing 'bad cells' with toxins."
Cheri Ackerman AraromiThe origin is smaller than the ambition. She traces it to a tenth-grade biology class and a single idea: DNA becomes RNA becomes protein. "The concept of a codon was absolutely captivating," she has said. That captivation carried her through a double major in biochemistry and Spanish at Calvin College, then to UC Berkeley for a PhD in chemical biology under Chris Chang. Her thesis was about copper - detecting it, measuring it, manipulating it inside living systems. Along the way she found copper-accumulating "megamitochondria" in the retina of a zebrafish, which is the kind of detail that tells you she was never going to stay in a lane.
She became a Hertz Fellow in 2012, a distinction reserved for scientists the foundation bets will reshape their fields. At the Broad as an NIH Kirschstein postdoc, she co-authored a 2020 paper in Nature on CARMEN, a viral diagnostics technology - work that landed in the middle of a pandemic and put her name on the map for high-throughput biology. Then she did the thing that academics talk about and rarely do. She left to build a company.
Copper chemistry to viral diagnostics to the skin microbiome is not a straight line. It is a series of jumps toward the same gravity: complex biological systems that resist simple answers. Concerto launched in 2020, cofounded with Jared Kehe, Bernardo Cervantes, and Adil Bahalim, much of the earliest work happening around MIT's Killian Court. Winning an Activate Global fellowship that March was, she has said, the moment the venture felt real. The Hertz Foundation handed her its Harold Newman and David Galas Entrepreneurial Initiative Award the same year.
By 2022 the company had closed a $23M Series A, part of roughly $47.5M raised to date. In 2023 she was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year New England finalist. In 2024 the Hertz Foundation - the institution that had bet on her as a graduate student - elected her to its Board of Directors. The student became a trustee.
"The opportunity to start a company is a gift. Consider all of the ways that it didn't have to turn out this way, and yet it did."
On building ConcertoFor a CEO chasing a category nobody has built, she talks less about conquest than about gratitude. She frames entrepreneurship as a privilege that demands humility, not ego. Even her view of fundraising is anthropological rather than adversarial. "You're not just looking for red flags," she has said of meeting investors. "You're trying to learn about communication preferences, what makes this investor tick." It is the same instinct she brings to microbes: figure out how the players relate before you decide who belongs in the band.
That ecosystem-first worldview scales past the skin. Concerto's mission statement reaches for human health, food quality, and crop yields - microbial ensembles wherever communities of microbes are doing work. The thesis is consistent: stop killing the bad guys, start composing better ecosystems. It is a quietly radical reframing of what medicine and agriculture are for, dressed up in the language of a concert hall.
She is, by her own account, an outdoors person - hiking, pickup volleyball, travel. The same person who maps microbial interaction networks for a living seems to like systems you can't fully control: a mountain trail, a loose pickup game, a city she hasn't visited. The double major in Spanish was not a detour either. It is a tell. People who learn a second language tend to believe that meaning lives in relationships between things, not in the things themselves. Which is, more or less, the entire premise of Concerto.
A droplet system that screens thousands of microbial interactions in parallel.
Co-first author on CARMEN viral diagnostics during the pandemic.
A microbiome-modulating candidate for atopic dermatitis.
Entrepreneur Of The Year, New England, 2023.
DNA becomes RNA becomes protein. The concept of a codon was absolutely captivating.
The interactions of the microbial world within us has been incredibly difficult to see - until now.
You're not just looking for red flags; you're trying to learn what makes this investor tick.
Consider all of the ways that it didn't have to turn out this way, and yet it did.