Jed Litwiniuk nearly left an interview invitation unanswered. A stranger had written asking him to appear on a YouTube channel, and his first reaction was familiar to anyone with a busy inbox: another message, another demand on the afternoon. “My first instinct? Ignore it,” he recalled. He answered anyway. The stranger was entrepreneur Inmar Yousef; the conversation happened; Litwiniuk was pleased he had made the time.
There is something pleasantly ordinary about this episode. A chief executive’s public life can look like an uninterrupted series of deliberate moves. Here was a small decision that began with reluctance and ended in a conversation he enjoyed. For the co-founder of Auxilius Pharma, whose career has moved through investing, acquisitions and management, it offers an approachable place to begin. Even a working life organised around business relationships has an inbox full of people one would rather meet later.
“My first instinct? Ignore it.”
Jed Litwiniuk, on an interview invitation
A return ticket with a purpose
America was already part of Litwiniuk’s story before he became a founder. As a teenager, he spent several years there attending high school, then returned to Poland. His later move to the United States was therefore a return, with a more specific purpose. He wanted to understand the American market and start his own business. The geography changed; the work of learning a place began again.
He enrolled in Columbia University’s Executive MHA programme, completing it in 2019. An experienced executive had chosen to become a student again. That choice gives the career a useful hinge: he had already managed organisations and evaluated investments, yet there was another market to understand and another set of people to meet. Experience had brought him to the classroom rather than made the classroom unnecessary.
His public professional profile lists Warsaw today. In a December 2023 interview, he described living near Boston. Those two locations belong to different moments in the record, and both make sense within a career involving Poland and the United States. The company’s American ambition and its Polish business relationships would become recurring parts of the same account.
The company before the company
Before Auxilius, Litwiniuk held investment roles at Enterprise Venture Fund and PZU and led mergers and acquisitions at LUX MED. He also served as chief executive of Centrum Medyczne Gamma. These are different seats at the business table. Investing involves choosing where money goes. Acquisitions involve bringing organisations together. Running a company means living with decisions after the meeting ends.
His career also included formal oversight. On 14 May 2014, he was appointed to the supervisory board of EMC Instytut Medyczny. The company’s annual report recorded him among its board members and on its audit committee. Such appointments are easily compressed into a line in a biography, but they describe responsibility for an organisation beyond one’s own desk.
He resigned from that supervisory board effective 5 November 2017. The precise dates give this part of the story firmer edges than a loose description of “years in finance”. There was a period of board service, followed by an ending. Meanwhile, his Columbia studies ran from 2017 to 2019. The sequence places the founding chapter alongside an actual change in his professional commitments.
A founder’s incorporation date is tidy. Preparation is messier. In Litwiniuk’s case, the earlier roles supply several kinds of preparation without requiring a story in which every previous job was secretly pointing toward Auxilius. The experience was there to be used. What he would build with it remained a decision.
A classmate becomes a co-founder
At Columbia, Litwiniuk met Uwe Tigör. In 2019, the classmates founded Auxilius Pharma. Litwiniuk became chief executive; Tigör became chief medical officer. The beginning is refreshingly recognisable: two people met during their studies and later chose to work together. A university can provide an education and, occasionally, someone with whom to spend a large portion of the next decade.
The partnership also gave their professional histories a shared address. Litwiniuk brought finance and operating experience into a company he helped create. Tigör brought his own industry background. Their names have continued to appear together in public interviews and company presentations. The founding connection has remained visible as the organisation has developed.
There had been another entrepreneurial step before Auxilius. The company’s 2024 presentation identifies Litwiniuk as a co-founder of Picket Pharmaceuticals, a New York startup. Auxilius therefore sits within a progression of roles and ventures. The first company in a short biography can be the second company in the person’s life.
A business with fewer fixed costs
Litwiniuk has publicly advocated the “Virtual Biotech” operating model. In his description, Auxilius worked with external specialists rather than maintaining its own laboratory and production plant. Keeping fixed costs low was part of the design. The business would bring in different expertise as the work required it.
The word “virtual” can make a company sound faintly imaginary. Here it describes an allocation of work. Someone still has to choose collaborators, agree responsibilities and keep the project moving. Buying expertise from outside an organisation changes the management task; it gives coordination a larger share of the day.
That approach has a practical connection to his previous career. An acquisitions executive and an investor are accustomed to examining organisations as collections of capabilities, obligations and costs. The same questions can be asked of a new company: which capabilities should it hold directly, and which can it obtain through a working relationship? The answer determines the shape of the organisation as much as the name on its door.
In August 2026, Auxilius announced an agreement with Skyepharma. Another external partner had entered the company’s public business story. The announcement gives a concrete counterpart to the operating model: a named organisation, a defined piece of work and a relationship that must be managed.
Capital has a home address
Litwiniuk’s explanation for Auxilius’s early Polish financing was straightforward. He had good relationships in the Polish capital market. In 2022, he announced an investment of roughly $1 million from CofounderZone, Augebit FIZ and business angels, thanking investors, advisers and colleagues by name. The announcement reads as a record of a group effort.
In December 2025, Auxilius announced a $4 million Series A. The investors included ff Venture Capital, NCBR Investment Fund and NanoGroup. The two public rounds belong to different stages and different investor groups. Together they show the financing relationships becoming part of the company’s development, rather than an incidental detail beside it.
The Polish connection was useful even while the company pursued an American business opportunity. An international venture does not acquire all its resources from one place. Familiarity with a capital market, access to collaborators and understanding of a target market can come from different countries. Litwiniuk’s career had supplied connections on both sides of that equation.
The festival detour
There is another map of his relationships, drawn in concerts and galleries. Speaking about his friend Andrzej Domański, Litwiniuk recalled that, during their travels, they looked for local bands and contemporary-art galleries. They had also gone together to Open’er and to OFF Festival in Katowice. More recently, he said, finding the time had become harder.
These details give a business biography a little air. A trip contains more than its scheduled appointment. A local band or an exhibition offers another way to encounter a city, and a friendship supplies the company in which to do it. Litwiniuk described the outings as a way of getting to know a place and its residents differently.
There is no need to turn the festival ticket into a management lesson. It is enough that the person who appears in investment announcements has also spent time looking for music and art with a friend. The crowded calendar is recognisable too. Growing responsibilities tend to be excellent at making themselves available; an evening out requires rather more negotiation.
A larger table, more people to call
By January 2026, Litwiniuk was discussing closer cooperation with NanoGroup, following its investment in Auxilius. He described the discussions in terms of developing the company’s projects and protecting the interests of capital-market participants. The language was measured: conversations were underway, but he was not presenting every detail as settled. A founder who has worked on investments knows that a relationship can move through several stages before its final structure is agreed.
An investor-webinar announcement listed Litwiniuk alongside NanoGroup chief executive Przemysław Mazurek for a scheduled discussion on 6 July about cooperation and development plans. The invitation put both executives in front of the same prospective audience, with their companies’ working relationship as the stated subject.
In June 2026, Auxilius and NanoGroup signed an investment agreement aimed at bringing Auxilius into the larger group through a share exchange. The announced arrangements envisaged Litwiniuk joining NanoGroup’s management board after the required formalities, while continuing to lead Auxilius. The proposed move put the founder’s next responsibilities alongside his existing ones.
In his own account of the agreement, he emphasised a stronger business structure, capital-market visibility and access to broader expertise. Those priorities fit the public career that preceded them. He had spent years around investment and organisational development; now the company he had co-founded was the one entering a larger arrangement.
That brings the story back to relationships, with rather more paperwork than the unsolicited interview invitation. A classmate became a co-founder. Investors became participants in a growing company. External specialists became collaborators. A larger group became a prospective home for the business. Litwiniuk’s next chapter will be written through those commitments, one conversation and one decision at a time.