Errik Anderson

Most founders build to sell. Errik Anderson built Alloy Therapeutics so that selling it would be structurally impossible. The controlling stock cannot be transferred. The company reinvests 100% of its revenue back into science. It exists, in his words, "so long as we don't run out of money." For a man who has founded or co-founded seven venture-backed biotech companies, this is the one he made permanent on purpose.

Today Anderson runs Alloy from Lexington, Massachusetts, a roughly 150-person operation that does something unusual in drug discovery: it gives away access. Alloy licenses the kind of antibody-discovery technology that used to live behind the walls of big pharma - platforms like its ATX-Gx humanized transgenic mice - to academic labs and small biotechs that could never have afforded to build it themselves. The pitch is "made for scientists, by scientists." The business model is closer to a public utility than a startup.

The idea arrived, as good ideas often do, out of irritation. Running drug-discovery work across his earlier ventures, Anderson kept buying the same equipment over and over, then haggling with vendors and waiting for quarterly discounts. "There was this moment of rebuying the same flow cytometer I had bought three times before," he has said. The logical leap was small and enormous at once: if we already do this for ourselves, why not offer it to everyone? "There's no reason why a hundred different research groups or companies couldn't get access to it."

That conviction has a tidy slogan, and Anderson put it on the merch: "Let the best drug win." It sounds like a sports chant, which is fitting, because Anderson is also a rugby man. He played lock, flanker, and number 8 starting in high school in Kansas City, kept playing at Dartmouth, and later co-founded and now chairs the New England Free Jacks, a professional Major League Rugby team. He has chaired the league's Board of Governors too. The through-line from the pitch to the lab is not subtle: he thinks the best outcomes come from teams, not gatekeepers.

Before Alloy, Anderson helped assemble a remarkable run of antibody companies. In 2007 he co-founded Adimab with Tillman Gerngross, the Dartmouth and Thayer professor who had sold his earlier firm GlycoFi to Merck. Anderson served as Adimab's chief operating officer as it grew into one of the most important antibody-discovery engines in the industry. Around it he founded or co-founded Compass Therapeutics, Alector, Arsanis, and Avitide. Collectively, technologies tied to his companies have helped discover more than 90 therapeutic antibodies now approved by the FDA or under review. He also spent a stretch as a venture investor, including at Biomatics Capital Partners, and began his career at Lehman Brothers Venture Capital and in marketing at Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Alloy's third pillar is the part that gives away the future: 82VS, an affiliated venture studio. The premise is that a first-time founder with good data is already, in Anderson's framing, "a fully formed company" - even with no lab and no infrastructure. So 82VS hands them the technology, the services, and the expertise to run their earliest experiments. "We're trying to cut out those first 1.5 to 2 years," he says. It is a deliberate attack on the two-year tax that biotech traditionally charges anyone without a pedigree or a war chest.

What makes Anderson genuinely unusual in an industry built on exclusivity is how comfortable he is being called a service provider. Where other founders bristle at the label "CRO," he leans in. The point is not status; the point is that more people making more medicine, faster, is the win condition. "At Alloy, collaboration is at the very foundation of everything we do - it's in our name. We make medicine with others." He has gone further, insisting Alloy will "find a way to collaborate with everyone, even those who look like competitors on the surface."

The financial story has kept pace with the philosophy. Alloy has raised in the range of $222 million in total, with its most recent reported round a Series E in 2026. And Anderson's ambitions are not staying inside the antibody box: Alloy has been pushing into oligonucleotides, cell therapy, and peptide discovery, extending the same democratized-access model into new corners of biology. Alongside Alloy, he runs his single-family office, Ulysses Diversified Holdings, which backs entrepreneurially-minded people building for-profit companies aimed at positive global impact.

He keeps close ties to where he started. Anderson holds an A.B. in economics from Dartmouth, an MBA from the Tuck School of Business (where he graduated a Tuck Scholar), and did graduate work in bioengineering at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. He has served on a stack of nonprofit boards including the Dartmouth Center for Entrepreneurship, the Tuck MBA Council, the Friends of the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, and the AVA Gallery and Art Center. The kid who learned rugby in Kansas City became the man who decided drug discovery should be played the same way - as a team sport where the best idea, not the biggest budget, gets the ball.

The Anderson doctrine.