A company called Superluminal has given itself a scheduling problem. The word means faster than light. A missed deadline at a business with that name must invite a particular sort of joke. Cony D’Cruz is its co-founder and chief executive. His route to the role, however, involved something much slower: a succession of commercial jobs, across companies and continents, learning how technical work becomes a business other people will back.
The name emerged in January 2022, when Nathaniel Brooks Horowitz and Soumya Ray at RA Capital Management proposed it for a project exploring ways to accelerate research. By August 2023, Superluminal Medicines had publicly launched with a $33 million seed round. The dramatic name came early. D’Cruz’s preparation had been going on for decades.
That makes his story an interesting companion to the usual account of an AI startup. There is a new company, computing infrastructure and a cast of investors. There is also a founder whose earlier job descriptions are full of sales, marketing, business development and alliances. Read those titles together and a different subject comes into focus: the work of getting specialists, customers and capital to move in the same direction.
The commercial apprenticeship
D’Cruz’s education paired a BSc in Applied Biology from the University of London with an MBA from The Open University. One qualification sits on the technical side of his subsequent career; the other sits on the commercial side. The pairing is a useful introduction to the jobs that followed, without requiring a childhood revelation or a conveniently prophetic university anecdote.
At Corning, he worked in sales and marketing in Europe and the United States. Later came IGEN, where his responsibilities included the life sciences division’s marketing strategy, investor presentations and fundraising. These were roles that put explanation to work. A technical capability has to be described, priced and fitted to somebody else’s priorities before it can become a commercial relationship.
From 2001 to 2010, he served as a senior vice president for North America at Evotec. His commercial work included arrangements with venture companies, research foundations and larger businesses. Those counterparties come with different expectations, budgets and decision processes. The common task is to make an agreement useful to people who bring different things to the table.
There is a temptation, looking backward from a founder’s current title, to treat earlier jobs as a lengthy waiting room. Here they are the substance of the story. Across these roles, D’Cruz was working at the point where a specialist capability meets an outside organization. Superluminal would eventually require exactly that kind of meeting, on several fronts at once.
A new office, a wider remit
In 2010, Proteros established a wholly owned American subsidiary in Maryland. D’Cruz became its president while also taking responsibility for worldwide commercial activities as chief business officer. The assignment combined a local presence with an international remit. A company could open an office on one side of the Atlantic while keeping its commercial relationships connected across several markets.
Proteros announced the appointment alongside an expansion of business development in Europe and Japan. His arrival belonged to an organizational plan, with colleagues taking responsibilities for strategic alliances and the Japanese market. The interesting detail is the distribution of the work. International expansion still required particular people to take responsibility for particular relationships.
In April 2013, he joined Schrödinger as senior vice president of business development. In January 2016, he became executive vice president and chief business officer. His remit there included strategic collaborations, new company formation and software sales in the United States and Japan. The sequence brought his commercial experience into a business built around computational tools.
That combination gives the later founding a continuity that the company’s newness can obscure. He had already worked with international sales, research partnerships and the formation of businesses. The chief executive role at Superluminal gathered those strands into a single job. It also moved him from helping an established organization make arrangements to carrying responsibility for the organization making them.
North America
President
Business development
Public launch
A founder with a cast
Superluminal’s launch paired D’Cruz with co-founder Ajay Yekkirala, who led discovery. Its initial leadership also included Yang-Ming Zhu in engineering, Yamina A. Berchiche in biology, Marek Orzechowski in computational chemistry and Murco Ringnalda in operations. Even the short version of that roster crosses several professional languages. Getting those people to work together is an executive task of its own.
The launch board brought in Andrew Levin from RA Capital Management and Dylan Morris from Insight Partners, alongside D’Cruz. NVIDIA and Gaingels also participated in the seed financing. The company therefore began its public life with connections into both scientific company building and the technology investment world. Its organizational chart was already a meeting place.
In September 2024, Superluminal added a scientific advisory board chaired by Morris J. Birnbaum. Advisers and employees have different jobs, but the decision added another set of experienced people to the company’s working relationships. It is a recurring feature of D’Cruz’s career: building the arrangements through which expertise can be brought into a business.
His own explanation in 2026 was admirably brief: “Look, it’s about the team.” He was describing conversations with investors who wanted to concentrate on the algorithm. For a chief executive of a company using machine learning, the remark puts attention on the people choosing, combining and applying the tools. An algorithm may get the meeting. Somebody still has to run it.
“Look, it’s about the team.”
Cony D’Cruz, 2026
Buying the work, renting the machinery
There is a practical example of that approach in Superluminal’s early computing setup. In April 2024, the company had a dozen employees and a small office in Waltham. D’Cruz described using cloud capacity when the team needed it, then reducing it again. Owning a roomful of machinery would have introduced a different collection of expenses and responsibilities.
He explained the arrangement through a car: the driver wants to get somewhere without inspecting the spark plugs before each journey. The analogy is deliberately ordinary. Underneath it sits a founder’s allocation problem. Time and money spent establishing infrastructure are time and money unavailable for the work that infrastructure is meant to support.
His point was about flexibility as much as size. A small organization can need substantial computing capacity for a particular task without needing to own that capacity permanently. The business choice is to match spending to work as it arrives. For a company with a name devoted to speed, there is something pleasingly unglamorous about paying attention to overhead.
The numbers have different jobs
The financing milestones arrived on a conspicuous scale. Superluminal announced a $120 million Series A in September 2024, led by RA Capital Management. Catalio Capital Management, Eli Lilly and Company and Cooley joined the investor group. In September 2026 came a $60 million Series B led by BVF Partners, with Deep Track Capital and Perceptive Advisors among the new participants.
Those three announced rounds total $213 million. They represent successive commitments of capital to the company. The totals also show an expanding set of relationships around D’Cruz and his colleagues: early backers returning, new investors joining and different firms leading successive stages. The founder’s job includes keeping that expanding group attached to a coherent business.
$213m in total announced round sizes. Bars compare individual rounds.
A separate agreement with Lilly, announced in August 2025, carried potential value of up to $1.3 billion. Its terms included upfront and near-term payments, an equity investment, development and commercial milestones, and royalties. That figure describes a contractual opportunity with conditions attached. It cannot be added to the funding chart as though it were another completed investment round.
The agreement also assigned work and rights. Superluminal would produce candidates meeting predefined criteria, after which Lilly would receive exclusive development and commercialization rights to resulting compounds. Without entering the technical particulars, the commercial architecture is clear: each organization brings a capability, with an agreed point at which responsibility changes hands.
For D’Cruz, the continuity is striking. Earlier appointments put him in charge of alliances and commercial activities; the Lilly collaboration made those activities central to the company he co-founded. The money attracts attention, understandably. The division of responsibilities tells us more about what the agreement actually requires people to do.
The international relationships extend beyond that agreement. In June 2025, Japan’s Axcelead Drug Discovery Partners announced a new joint project with Superluminal, building on earlier collaborations. D’Cruz emphasized the partner’s experience and range of capabilities. The announcement adds a concrete example to his commercial history: another organization contributing expertise to work that the two businesses planned to undertake together.
What the years were for
At NVIDIA’s GTC conference in March 2025, D’Cruz joined a panel with fellow founders and technology leaders, including Alessandro De Sario, Davide Tricarico and Shai Shen-Orr, with NVIDIA’s Chelsea Sumner. It placed him in a familiar professional setting: a conversation across organizational boundaries, around the practical uses of technology.
His career makes the founder label more interesting. The new venture sits on years of work in organizations with different sizes, markets and commercial models. His record offers an account of entrepreneurship in which experience accumulates before it becomes visible under a new company name. The apparent starting line turns out to be well into the race.
Superluminal supplies the impatient name. D’Cruz supplies a career spent arranging the people, partnerships and resources a business needs to move. The next chapter will be written through the work those arrangements enable. For now, the pairing is enough to hold the attention: a company in a hurry, led by someone who took a long route to founding it.