Jonathan Sporn and the art of starting again

Jonathan Sporn has a joke for the visitor expecting a grand headquarters. “Billion-dollar headquarters right here,” he says of Gilgamesh’s modest workspace near Manhattan’s Union Square. The company operates remotely. The room serves largely as a mailing address. Corporate grandeur has apparently been asked to work from home.

The joke lands because there really is a large transaction behind it. In 2025, AbbVie agreed to acquire the original Gilgamesh company in a deal announced at up to $1.2 billion. Sporn’s team then continued in a separate business. The exit came with another entrance.

For Sporn, co-founder and CEO of Gilgamesh Pharma, this was another turn in a career that had already included academic institutions, large corporations and a previous startup. His story invites a longer look at the word “founder.” By the time Gilgamesh existed on paper, he had spent decades learning how organizations work.

An apprenticeship measured in decades

Sporn graduated from Duke University in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in Zoology and Animal Biology. He earned his M.D. at the University of Miami in 1984. His subsequent career took him through Boston, research work at Massachusetts General Hospital and a fellowship at the NIH beginning in 2000.

Johnson & Johnson followed, with a research leadership role from 2003 to 2006. At Pfizer, his responsibilities included research and business development. These were years spent inside organizations with established procedures, specialist teams and a scale far beyond the small company he would eventually help assemble.

There is something useful about putting those dates beside the founding date. The familiar startup timeline begins when the company does. Sporn’s working life had a substantial first act before the entrepreneurial chapters arrived. His experience crossed the boundaries between doing research, managing it and considering its commercial future.

The progression also gives his later choices context. Creating a company meant changing the setting in which he worked, while carrying his accumulated experience into it. A founder can arrive at the incorporation table with an empty company register and a rather full professional history.

The first company was already behind him

In 2017, Sporn founded Perception Neuroscience. He served as its president and CEO before becoming chief scientific officer. The company was subsequently acquired by ATAI Life Sciences. Before Gilgamesh began, he had already experienced the process of forming a venture and seeing it move into another organization.

Sporn has described that chapter with a brief parenthesis: “exited.” It is an economical word for a considerable change of circumstances. In Sporn’s career, the next line of the biography is another company. Perception became part of his experience; Gilgamesh became his next responsibility.

That sequence is worth keeping intact. Calling him a startup founder is accurate, but incomplete. He is a repeat founder whose first entrepreneurial chapter followed a long corporate career. Each of those stages belongs in the account of how he reached the next one.

Five founders, then a summer in the accelerator

Gilgamesh began in 2019. Sporn’s fellow founders were Andrew Kruegel, Dalibor Sames, Mike Cunningham and Jeff Witkin. Giving the group its names matters. A chief executive becomes the public face of an organization, but the founding work belongs to several people.

Kruegel’s role provides one example of that division of experience. Alongside his scientific work, he developed expertise in fundraising, operations and intellectual property strategy. Those responsibilities connect the technical work to the practical business of maintaining a company around it.

Gilgamesh joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch. Sporn and Kruegel brought their company into the same accelerator batch. For a business assembled by experienced researchers, it was a step into a network associated with newly formed companies and the early decisions that shape them.

The combination is interesting without requiring a conversion story. Professional experience and startup membership can sit comfortably on the same résumé. The company was young. Its founders brought histories of their own. The shared task was to turn those histories into an organization that could accomplish something together.

A partner arrives before the buyer

In December 2022, Gilgamesh announced a $39 million Series B led by Prime Movers Lab. Other participants included Alumni Ventures, Palo Santo, Negev Capital, Route 66, JLS Fund, Satori Capital and Gron Ventures. The company was assembling a group of financial backers alongside its founding team.

A different kind of relationship appeared in 2024. On May 13, 2024, AbbVie and Gilgamesh announced a collaboration and option-to-license agreement. Gilgamesh would receive $65 million upfront, with the possibility of additional option fees and milestones, plus royalties.

The 2024 agreement made Gilgamesh eligible for up to $1.95 billion in aggregate option fees and milestones. It also provided for tiered royalties ranging from mid-single to low-double digits on net sales. These were conditional economics attached to the collaboration, separate from the acquisition announced the following year.

The arrangement established a working relationship between the companies before the acquisition announcement. Its terms also assigned future responsibilities: if AbbVie exercised its option, it would lead development and commercialization. The agreement connected a smaller company’s work to a larger organization’s capabilities.

For Sporn, the investor names connect one stage of company building to the next. Satori Capital participated in the 2022 round. Satori Neuro would later lead the spinout’s financing. Prime Movers Lab had already backed the original company. The sequence gives the story a cast of returning participants around its chief executive.

It is tempting to telescope this part of a founder’s career into a single success. The actual sequence has more texture. Venture investors backed a company. A corporate partner signed an agreement. Later, that partner became an acquirer. Each event changed the business in a different way.

“Billion-dollar headquarters right here.”

Jonathan Sporn, September 2026

Read the small print

The acquisition agreement arrived on August 25, 2025. Its announced ceiling was $1.2 billion, including an upfront payment and development milestones. The wording is part of the story. “Up to” describes a combination of money paid at closing and money dependent on later events.

AbbVie’s subsequent reporting put more detail around the transaction. Its 2025 annual report recorded a $906 million upfront cash payment, with additional development milestone payments possible. The acquisition was completed in October 2025. Those are company transaction figures, with their own contractual and accounting details.

The deal also contained a decision about what would remain outside the acquired business. Employees and the other programs would move into a new independent entity, Gilgamesh Pharma Inc. The earlier option-to-license agreement with AbbVie would continue there. A corporate split preserved an operating company around the continuing work.

For the reader following Sporn, that structure supplies the next scene. He remained a founder and executive with a team to lead. The transaction transferred ownership of the original company while creating room for another organization to carry on. A celebratory announcement and a new set of responsibilities arrived together.

The team gets another beginning

On March 24, 2026, Gilgamesh Pharma announced a $60 million Series A led by Satori Neuro. This was the spinout’s first formal capital raise. The company said the same management team was leading it and that it had inherited capital from the acquisition and the previous collaboration.

That continuity makes the new Series A distinctive. The label usually signals an early financing chapter. Here it belonged to a new entity led by an established team, carrying forward work and relationships from its predecessor. The company’s legal beginning and its people’s experience ran on different clocks.

Amy Kruse, Satori Neuro’s chief investment officer, had supported the business earlier in its history. Her involvement illustrates another connection carried across the change. The new financing brought a fresh announcement, but some of the people around the table already knew the company and its leadership.

Sporn also returned to the public conversation about building Gilgamesh. In March 2026, he joined Greg Kubin and Matias Serebrinsky on the Business Trip podcast to discuss the company and the AbbVie agreement. The transaction had become something he could examine as part of a continuing career.

Two places to put the next chapter

Away from the corporate milestones, Sporn has two geographical bases: New York City and the mountains of North Carolina. It is a pleasantly concrete line among institutional names and executive titles. A life can have more than one working backdrop, even when a company needs a single address.

His public LinkedIn activity includes plans to speak at Burning Man’s Day Dream Camp. It places him in another setting beyond the corporate announcement. These public appearances add another setting to a career that has moved between institutions and ventures.

Those settings fit within the same working life. The executive speaking about a corporate agreement is also the founder who has publicly planned a desert talk and described a home in the mountains. They are ordinary biographical details, but they make room for a person alongside the transaction dates.

By autumn 2026, the next chapter had a company name, financing and a familiar leadership team. Sporn’s story had reached an acquisition without exhausting its cast. Back in Manhattan, the modest headquarters remained an appropriate setting for his joke. The company had changed shape. There was still work to do.