Daniel Grau and the art of starting again

On November 18, 2021, Avilar Therapeutics introduced itself with $60 million in seed financing. Daniel Grau was its CEO and president. The announcement marked a public beginning for the company, but Grau had already accumulated a considerable number of beginnings of his own: a marketing role, a consulting career, a promotion into operations, a presidency, and more than one chief executive appointment.

There is a temptation to read a career like his backward, beginning with the latest title and treating everything before it as preparation. The route is more interesting when followed forward. Grau earned a humanities fellowship at Yale, joined CombinatoRx in 2001, became its chief operating officer in 2007, and subsequently took operating roles at Cortria, Heptares, and Sojournix. Each chapter changed the scope of his responsibility.

By the time Avilar launched publicly, he had worked inside a company that went public, led a company later acquired, served as president of another acquired business, and co-founded a new venture. Those are different kinds of corporate experience. An acquisition, a financing, and a promotion may all produce announcements. They leave rather different work waiting on the following morning.

Three Yale degrees, then the commercial world

Grau’s academic credentials take up more space than the usual line at the bottom of an executive biography. He earned a BA in English Literature with High Honors at Davidson College and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. At Yale, he earned an MPhil in philosophy, an MA, and an MAR. His awards included a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities and the Day Graduate Prize.

The humanities fellowship is a distinctive starting point for someone whose later work would include commercial operations, business development, and company financing. It supplies an arresting detail without requiring a tidy theory about how education determines a career. Three graduate degrees are a substantial academic undertaking. They are also, in this case, only the opening entries in a much longer professional record.

Before management consulting, Grau worked as director of marketing and business development at an information technology startup. Between 1998 and 2001, he worked as a management consultant. His assignments included work with Pharmacia, Pharmacia & Upjohn, and Eisai. The remit covered corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and new product commercialization. His early professional responsibilities already crossed the boundary between planning a business and finding ways to bring its work to market.

That range would recur in his executive appointments. A company’s commercial questions can start well before it has anything to sell: what to acquire, which relationships to build, where to direct resources. Grau’s early roles put those questions into the chronology before the chief executive title appeared. The business card grew shorter; the list of responsibilities did not necessarily follow suit.

The six-year apprenticeship at CombinatoRx

Grau joined CombinatoRx in 2001. The company went public in 2005. On January 16, 2007, it announced his promotion to a newly created chief operating officer position. He had most recently been senior vice president of commercial operations and would continue reporting to Alexis Borisy, the company’s president and CEO.

The promotion’s details are revealing. Grau’s remit combined program management, strategic marketing for new products, business development, alliance management, and informatics. It was a job assembled across disciplines, with responsibility for relationships outside the company as well as coordination within it. The title compressed a rather crowded agenda into three letters.

The company also credited him with negotiating agreements that brought it research funding and product rights. That places dealmaking inside his operating record, rather than leaving it as an ornament beside the job title. Funding and rights are concrete business inputs. Negotiating them changes what an organization can afford to undertake and what it is entitled to pursue.

From 2001 to 2004, Grau was vice president of corporate development and strategy. He then served as vice president of commercial operations during 2004 and 2005, becoming senior vice president in January 2006. Six years separated his arrival from the COO appointment. The dates make this chapter particularly useful: there was time inside one organization before the enlarged remit. His later biography would contain several companies, but here the change came through promotion. A new beginning can occur without a new employer; sometimes the organization simply hands someone a larger set of keys.

Acquisitions, and another beginning

Cortria supplied a different assignment: chief executive. A July 2009 filing identifies Grau as its president and CEO, and his subsequent career biographies record the company’s acquisition in 2010. He later became president of Heptares Therapeutics. By 2015, Heptares had reached an acquisition of its own, this time by Japan’s Sosei Group.

The Heptares transaction had two distinct financial components. Sosei agreed to $180 million as consideration for the shares, with up to $220 million in contingent consideration. The maximum was $400 million. The distinction matters: the first amount and the possible later payments describe different commitments. A headline number can be simple while the agreement underneath it remains conditional.

Grau’s next chapter included a return to company creation. He co-founded Sojournix in 2016 and served as its CEO and director. In January 2019, Sojournix announced a $44 million Series C financing. Its investor group included RA Capital Management, Boxer Capital, Frazier Healthcare Partners, Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, and Janus Henderson Investors.

Earlier rounds had provided $7 million and $19 million. The Series C took the company’s announced cumulative financing to $70 million. Later that year, Grau was scheduled to lead a discussion and questions at the LSX World Congress USA in Boston, addressing the business and financial opportunities and challenges of securing later-stage investment. Fundraising had become both part of his operating work and a subject he could discuss with other executives.

Sojournix’s business also involved an acquisition of assets, rather than an acquisition of an entire company. In 2017, it entered an asset purchase transaction with H. Lundbeck A/S. The agreement transferred patents, data, and materials to Sojournix, which controlled worldwide development and commercialization of the acquired compounds and intellectual property. Lundbeck received upfront consideration, including an equity stake, and remained eligible for later milestone and royalty payments.

These terms give the co-founder chapter a more tangible shape. The company acquired a package of rights and materials, while the seller retained a financial connection through shares and possible future payments. Corporate beginnings can involve an existing body of work, with ownership and economic interests redistributed through an agreement.

A company takes the stage with $60 million

Avilar’s public launch returned Grau to the early part of a company’s life. RA Capital Management supplied the announced $60 million seed financing. The launch team included Effie Tozzo as chief scientific officer and Phil Graham as chief development officer. Graham had also worked at Sojournix, a connection between two chapters in Grau’s career.

Avilar’s formation involved a wider group. Its founding team at RA Capital included Milind Deshpande, Jesse Chen, Nathaniel Horwitz, and Jamie Kasuboski. Deshpande chaired the board. Grau’s position brought executive leadership into that company-building effort. The launch was the product of named people with different responsibilities, a useful corrective to the tendency of corporate stories to give one title all the verbs.

“We see a very large scale of opportunity here”

Daniel Grau · 2021

In February 2023, Avilar announced that its seed round had grown to $75 million. Sanofi Ventures, Medical Excellence Capital, and Astellas Venture Management joined the investor syndicate. Paulina Hill of Sanofi Ventures joined the board, while Brian Halak of Medical Excellence Capital became a board observer. The additional financing changed both the capital available and the group around the company.

The increase was $15 million, or 25 percent, on the original announced amount. These figures describe company financing. Their significance in Grau’s story lies in their timing: he was CEO and president at the launch and at the upsize. The operating chapter had continued beyond the opening announcement into another round of commitments.

The introductions that keep their value

Some connections in Grau’s career have a longer interval between introduction and appointment. When he joined TetraGenetics’ board in May 2019, he recalled first meeting the company while president of Heptares. An encounter during one executive role had become a board relationship during another. It is a small, specific example of how the companies in a career can remain connected.

Other appointments added different forms of responsibility. He served on the board of Research Alliance Corporation I, joining in May 2020. His record also includes a place on Concert Pharmaceuticals’ Product Advisory Board and advisory work for Nimbus Therapeutics. These positions sit alongside the executive roles, extending the career beyond the companies where he held day-to-day operating titles.

At Research Alliance Corporation I, Grau’s board service placed him alongside Peter Kolchinsky, the CEO and chairman, and Matthew Hammond, the chief financial officer and a director. The company’s 2021 annual report explicitly connected Grau’s board qualifications to his executive leadership and experience with companies in the sector. Here, the accumulated operating record appeared in a different setting: the explanation for a governance appointment. Earlier jobs had become relevant credentials for a later responsibility.

Today, Avilar’s biography lists Grau as a director and describes the CEO and president position as a previous role. Raven calls that earlier assignment seed-stage CEO. Cirrus Therapeutics also lists him as a director, while his current advisory roles include Raven and HotSpot. The language is precise enough to preserve the sequence: early-stage executive leadership, followed by a continuing board role.

That sequence gives the career its shape. The humanities fellow became a commercial executive. The commercial executive took on operations. Later came company leadership, co-founding, and board service. Avilar’s $60 million launch is one conspicuous moment in that route. The more durable story is the succession of responsibilities before and after it, and the repeated return to a company’s next beginning.