He left a corner office at a pharma giant to chase a stubborn, unglamorous idea: the drugs that help people have children already work in Europe. Someone just had to prove it to America. So he built Granata Bio.
Picture two maps of the same medicine. In Europe, a fertility drug has a decade of commercial data, a track record of safety, a market full of doctors who trust it. In the United States, the same molecule sits behind a taller regulatory wall - a market that demands clinical pregnancy or live-birth endpoints, longer trials, more cost. Same science. Different door.
Evan Sussman built a company in the gap between those two maps.
That company is Granata Bio, founded in 2018 and run out of the Boston area. Its premise is almost suspiciously simple: find medications already proven abroad for in-vitro fertilization, in-license them, and shepherd them through U.S. clinical development and commercialization. Lower the cost. Widen the options. Open the door wider for the roughly one in five women who struggle with infertility.
What makes the bet interesting is not a single breakthrough molecule. It is Sussman's read on the regulatory chessboard. “We know based on 10 years of European commercial data that this drug is safe and effective,” he has said. The real question - the one his company answers for a living - is the next one: “How do we prove it in the U.S.?”
He spent nearly a decade learning that question from the inside. Before Granata, Sussman put in roughly nine years at EMD Serono, the Merck KGaA division, rising to run the U.S. fertility and fertility-technologies business. He knew the drugs, the doctors, the buyers, and the awkward arithmetic of who can and cannot afford treatment.
The disparity he kept circling back to was almost tidy. “There was just this odd disparity between European markets that were really saturated with drugs,” he has explained - not oversaturated, just stocked with options known to be safe and effective after years on the market - “and a U.S. market with, yes, a different regulatory threshold.” Europe had the proof. America had the wall. Granata Bio exists to carry one across the other.
The founding moment was not a whiteboard or a pitch deck. It was a train.
Sussman was mid-journey when the pieces clicked. He phoned two people he trusted - Dave Paller and Mark Chung, classmates from his Yale MBA, with whom he had once built a business plan for an orthopedic startup. The shared reps of that earlier project had forged something rare: a working partnership that didn't need warming up.
“I think I've got our thing,” he told them. “I think I've got our company here.”
And then he waited. For two years. Conviction is one thing; walking away from a secure, senior role at a global pharma company is another. Sussman didn't leave Serono until 2016, taking the time to build the nerve before building the company. The co-founding team eventually rounded out with Sarah Faranda and the partners who would bring more than seven decades of combined fertility experience to the table.
He is honest about the math of starting up - the kind of honesty most founders save for after the exit. “If you knew exactly how difficult things would be, you'd never take the leap,” he has reflected. “And it's that delusion that things will be easy that gets you into the game.”
I was on a train, and I called Dave and Mark and I said, ‘I think I've got our thing. I think I've got our company here.’
Evan Sussman, Sarah Faranda, David Paller and Marc Chung. Three of them first worked together as Yale classmates - the partnership predates the company.
Most biopharma startups follow a familiar script: raise enormous sums, burn cash for a decade, pray a molecule clears the clinic. Sussman ran the opposite play.
Granata Bio opened with a fee-for-service and co-development model - doing paid work designing trials and developing programs - which made it, in his words, “revenue-positive quite early in our company lifecycle, which was the exact opposite of most biopharma companies.” Survival first. Swing for the fences once you've earned the right to.
When the venture capital did arrive, it arrived well. In January 2024, Granata closed a $14 million Series A led by GV (Google Ventures), with CooperSurgical, Gedeon Richter, Alumni Ventures, Amboy Street Ventures and Vibe Bio joining. The round was later extended, pushing total capital raised past the $30 million mark.
His advice to other founders is unfussy and a little flinty: “Be willing to do the work yourself.” He means it literally - drafting regulatory documents, designing the studies, negotiating the deals. Founders who hand all of that to someone else, he suggests, never really learn their own business.
// capital raised, granata bio (approx, USD)
Figures per public funding announcements and reporting.
Roughly nine years at EMD Serono / Merck KGaA, rising to Marketing & Business Unit Head for U.S. Fertility - building programs to widen access for under-recognized patients.
Earns an MBA in Healthcare Leadership from the Yale School of Management.
Leaves Serono - finally - to chase the idea he first floated from a train.
Co-founds Granata Bio. Bootstraps early revenue through a fee-for-service and co-development model.
Closes a $14M Series A led by GV (Google Ventures). The round is later extended.
Acquires Oviva Therapeutics (ovarian aging); secures a strategic investment and co-development partnership with Gedeon Richter.
Granata acquired Oviva Therapeutics and its lead candidate OVI-586, moving into ovarian aging. The plan: start with IVF stimulation for patients with diminished ovarian reserve - “an acute, time-limited intervention,” per Sussman - before reaching toward longer-term indications.
The Hungarian pharma took a significant equity stake and a board seat, with the companies co-developing BEMFOLA (FSH) for the U.S. and a royalty agreement on Granata's hMG program. “Deep therapeutic expertise, operational agility, and shared commitment to fertility care,” Sussman said.
Sussman is blunt about what keeps IVF out of reach. Cost is the biggest obstacle. The U.S. lands middle-of-the-pack for insured patients, he notes, but near the bottom of the developed world for those paying out of pocket. Add a physician shortage - only 30 to 50 reproductive endocrinology fellows graduate a year - and you have a supply problem stacked on a price problem.
His read on demand is generational. “People are having children later, which is great financially but poor biologically,” he says, “and so I think the utilization will continue to go up.” He credits benefit designers like Progyny, Carrot and Kindbody with proving employers that the demand was there all along - that the elasticity skeptics had it wrong. A decade or two ago, he notes, infertility was treated as optional. That framing has quietly collapsed, and the coverage is starting to follow the conviction.
“We know based on 10 years of European commercial data that this drug is safe and effective. How do we prove it in the U.S.?”
“If I knew then what I know now, maybe I wouldn't have done this.”
“It's that delusion that things will be easy that gets you into the game and then once you're there you say, ‘Okay, it's way harder than I thought, but it's achievable.’”
“Be willing to do the work yourself.”
“People are having children later, which is great financially but poor biologically.”
“I think I've got our thing. I think I've got our company here.”
His undergraduate degree was in organizational behavior and management - he learned fertility from the commercial side, not a lab bench.
The whole company traces back to one phone call placed from a moving train.
He sat on the Corporate Council of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association and worked with the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
Off the clock you'll find him trail running, on a golf course, or hiking with his two kids.
Granata's edge is an arbitrage of trust: drugs Europe already believes in, re-proven for America's stricter bar.
He waited two years between “I've got our company” and actually quitting his job.