Gerrit Klaerner and the business of starting again

In July 2007, Ilypsa became an Amgen company. Four years after Gerrit Klaerner helped found it, the business had reached the sort of event that can compress an entire career into a number: $420 million, the announced acquisition price. Yet by October, Klaerner was involved in a new venture carrying forward technology from the old one. The buyer had acquired a company. The story still had somewhere to go.

That next venture was Relypsa. Klaerner helped negotiate its spinout from Amgen as an adviser to lead investor 5AM Ventures, then became its president. It began with a $33 million Series A. A sale and a fresh financing round sat only months apart on his calendar. Anyone hoping to file the first company neatly under “finished” would have needed another folder.

The sequence is a useful entrance to Klaerner’s career. He is a German polymer chemist whose professional life has moved through research, business development, founding and executive leadership. Ilypsa, Relypsa, Tricida and Helicore supply the company names. Between them lie the more revealing details: who held the title, which colleagues returned, what changed hands, and what happened after the ceremony.

A sale with another beginning inside it

Ilypsa was founded in 2003. Klaerner’s responsibilities eventually included the chief business officer role, but the work behind that title was quite specific. He handled company-side financing work and licensing relationships, and co-led acquisition negotiations and diligence. The chemist had become involved in the arrangements that determine whether a young organization has money, partners and a future owner.

One partnership was with Astellas in Japan. Announced in 2006, the agreement was worth up to $92 million, including $22 million upfront and further payments tied to milestones. Klaerner described choosing a Japanese partner as “a very deliberate strategic decision.” The distinction between the upfront sum and the potential total matters. A contract can have a handsome headline while its largest numbers still depend on future events.

Amgen announced its agreement to buy Ilypsa on June 4, 2007, and completed the acquisition on July 18. Relypsa followed that autumn, built around Ilypsa’s platform technology and early work. Klaerner’s part in the spinout placed him on both sides of the transition: helping one business find a buyer, then helping organize another business around work that continued.

There is a tendency to tell startup history as a procession of arrivals and exits. This chapter offers something more awkward and more interesting. An organization can be acquired while parts of its technical history acquire a new address. The transaction sets the boundaries of ownership; the next company starts another set of responsibilities. Klaerner was involved in making those boundaries concrete.

The chemist learns a second vocabulary

Before the financing rounds came Marburg and Mainz. Klaerner earned his master’s degree in chemistry at Philipps University of Marburg and his doctorate in polymer and organic chemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. He moved to the United States in 1997 for postdoctoral work in California, with research at Stanford University and the IBM Almaden Research Center.

In October 1998 he joined Symyx Technologies. His roles there progressed from staff scientist to senior staff scientist and director of business development. Those titles mark the transition without requiring a conversion story. The scientific training remained part of his background as his responsibilities expanded toward the commercial life of the organization.

A block copolymers patent application, filed in 1999 and published in 2002, names Klaerner among its inventors and Symyx as its original assignee. It is a small, concrete connection to the earlier research chapter. Years later, executive biographies would devote more space to financing and acquisitions. The patent record keeps the technical work in view.

In his career, scientific invention and business development sit unusually close together. A polymer has its own architecture. A company needs agreements about funding, ownership and responsibilities. The analogy has limits, but his résumé contains work on both. By the time Ilypsa was sold, he had participated in experiments, partnerships and the diligence required when another organization decides to buy.

The company goes on without you

Klaerner served as Relypsa’s president and a board member from October 2007 until June 2013. That is the period to attach to his executive role. In July 2016, Galenica announced an agreement to acquire Relypsa for approximately $1.53 billion, strengthening its Vifor Pharma business. John Orwin was Relypsa’s president and chief executive at that point.

The three-year gap matters. Klaerner helped establish the company, and its later history became part of the history of something he helped build. The acquisition happened under subsequent leadership. Giving each chapter its proper dates makes room for both the founding work and the people responsible for what came later.

The distinction also makes his own story less predictable. While Relypsa continued toward that transaction, Klaerner was already working on Tricida, the company he founded in 2013. He became its president and CEO that August. One venture was still developing its later chapters while its former president had taken on another beginning.

The people who come back

A career told through company names can overlook the colleagues who give it continuity. Wilhelm Stahl first met Klaerner in 2003, when Klaerner was at Ilypsa and Stahl worked at Saltigo. Klaerner later hired Stahl to run pharmaceutical operations at Relypsa. In 2017, he hired him again, this time as Tricida’s chief technology officer.

The repeated appointments are a more specific fact than a general claim about loyalty or leadership. They show an executive returning to someone with whom he had already worked. Manufacturing experience was part of that relationship. Behind the changes in company name, there was a shared professional history.

Other names recur further along the sequence. Helicore’s current team includes Kalpesh Biyani, whose experience includes Ilypsa, Relypsa and Tricida. Paul Kierstead, its vice president for drug substance, previously headed chemistry and drug substance at Tricida. These are individual careers intersecting across organizations, each with its own responsibilities.

Klaerner appears within a working network of scientists, manufacturing specialists, executives and investors. A company can have a new name while its people bring experience earned elsewhere. The appointments preserve that continuity even as each organization acquires a history of its own.

A bell is a moment, not an ending

Tricida became publicly listed in 2018. On October 14, 2019, Klaerner rang Nasdaq’s opening bell at the MarketSite in Times Square as the company’s president and CEO. A bell ceremony gives a business career a wonderfully definite sound. The years before it and after it are usually less obliging.

A month later, during an earnings call, an analyst invited him to offer a theory about a pending review. His answer contained a useful sentence: “I’ve learned over the years not to speculate.” It was a response to a particular question, rather than a declaration of his whole personality. Still, it provides a counterweight to the certainty that founder stories so often borrow after the fact.

The transaction sets the boundaries of ownership; the next company starts another set of responsibilities.

On January 11, 2023, Tricida filed a voluntary Chapter 11 petition in Delaware. Its history proceeded into liquidation. The public listing and the opening bell remain real events. So does the bankruptcy. Putting them in the same chronology keeps the career from becoming an album containing only photographs of people smiling beside large numbers.

It would be easy to make the next company into a tidy redemption ending. The record supports a more restrained account: Klaerner returned to executive work at another venture. That is a documented continuation, with new colleagues, investors and responsibilities. The existence of a next chapter does not settle the meaning of the earlier one.

Another company, a different chapter

Helicore emerged from stealth on January 28, 2025, announcing $65 million in Series A financing. Versant Ventures and OrbiMed co-led the round, with Longitude Capital and Wellington Management participating. Klaerner was its president and CEO at emergence. Klaus Veitinger chaired the board, and research work was supported by Ridgeline, Versant’s discovery operation in Switzerland.

Several of those institutional names had appeared in the financing history of Tricida. The overlap gives the Helicore chapter another connection to his earlier work, alongside the returning technical colleagues. It is a business assembled within an existing professional world, with its own ownership and leadership arrangements.

The title has since changed hands. As of October 2026, Helicore’s official leadership roster lists Peter DiLaura as chief executive and board director. Klaerner’s place in this chapter is the founding president and CEO at its public emergence. That wording preserves his contribution while leaving the present tense to the person currently holding the job.

Across the sequence, the dates do more work than any convenient character label. There is the chemist at Symyx, the cofounder involved in Ilypsa’s partnerships, the negotiator helping create Relypsa, the executive at Tricida and the leader at Helicore’s emergence. Some organizations changed owners. One entered bankruptcy. Colleagues returned. Another CEO now holds the Helicore title.

The most revealing moment may still be that turn in 2007, when a sale was followed by a spinout. The acquisition announcement looked complete. Klaerner’s working life continued on the other side of it, with another company to organize and another set of agreements to make. A career can fit on a page. Building it requires considerably more paperwork.