The co-founder and CEO of SweetBio, a Memphis biotech that bioengineers Manuka honey, gelatin and hydroxyapatite into a bandage your insurance actually covers.
A diabetic ulcer takes longer to close than most marriages take to plan. It can sit, weep, and refuse to heal for months, sometimes years. It is one of the most expensive small things in American medicine. Kayla Rodriguez Graff thought that was strange. She also thought it was solvable, with honey.
Graff runs SweetBio out of the University of Memphis CommuniTech Research Park. Her flagship product, APIS, is a dissolvable patch made from three ingredients you can almost spell. Gelatin. Manuka honey. Hydroxyapatite. The patch goes on the wound, the wound starts to behave, and the patch politely vanishes. No removal. No re-tearing of fragile tissue. No follow-up appointment to peel off the thing the last appointment stuck on.
The trick is that none of this is folk medicine. APIS is FDA-cleared. Medicare covers it. Commercial insurance covers it. The company has raised more than ten million dollars and just shipped a sibling product, VERIS, for the over-the-counter aisle. Manuka honey, it turns out, plays a serious role in a serious business.
Yield: one FDA clearance.
If 90% of people think your idea is a good one, you're already too late. — Kayla Rodriguez Graff, to Inc. Magazine
Margin note: SweetBio graduated the ZeroTo510 medical device accelerator the same year Apple released the first Apple Watch. The Watch got more press. The patch got Medicare coverage.
Before the lab, Graff spent six years at Target Corp running customer experience and operations strategy. It is an unglamorous training program for a biotech CEO, and the most useful one she could have picked. You can read a thousand pitch decks and never learn what an unhappy customer sounds like at scale. She learned.
The biotech part came from her brother. Dr. Isaac Rodriguez is a tissue engineering and biomaterials researcher with over a thousand academic citations. He had the chemistry. She had the operations. Their now-husband-and-brother-in-law, Kevin Graff, joined the founding team. So the company is, in the most literal sense, a family business.
Her grandmother ran a bridal shop in Puerto Rico. Graff told Inc. she watched her whole childhood, and it gave her a model. "I've been fortunate my whole life to watch really strong women succeed." That sentence does a lot of work in her bio. It is also the most disarming thing she says.
She holds an MBA from Hult International Business School focused on disruptive business models and new product development, plus a project management certificate from Cornell. The credentials are tidy. The career is not. She moved from a retail giant to running clinical trials and Medicare reimbursement pathways, which is the equivalent of switching from poker to chess and winning the first three games.
Title: Co-founder & CEO, SweetBio
HQ: Memphis, Tennessee
Co-founders: Dr. Isaac Rodriguez (CSO, brother) and Kevin Graff (husband)
Education: Hult International Business School (MBA); Cornell (PM cert.)
Boards: Epicenter · LifeScienceTN · Shelby Farms Park Conservancy · Agape Child & Family Services
Instagram bio: "Mom x3. CEO @sweetbio.inc"
SweetBio's pitch is not really about honey. It is about who can afford to heal. Diabetes hits Black, Latino and American Indian communities harder than the national average. Memphis, where SweetBio is headquartered, has neighborhoods where the majority of Black and Hispanic residents are underinsured. The standard advanced wound dressing is expensive, fussy, and assumes a patient will return for changes. APIS is cheap, dissolves on its own, and assumes a patient who is tired.
"We wanted our technology to empower the next generation of Memphians and remove barriers to their success and wellness," Graff has said. The line is the company. The company is the line.
During COVID-19, the team kept hearing the same kind of story. A patient was scheduled for an amputation. They tried the patch. The amputation got cancelled. Graff repeats this carefully because it is not a marketing claim. It is a thing that happened often enough to remember.
Source: SweetBio product positioning · APIS (Rx) · VERIS (OTC)
If most people think your idea is good, you missed the window. She says it like a gym mantra. It is also why she went into wound care instead of, say, another scheduling app.
She runs the company with her brother and her husband. Holiday dinners and board meetings overlap. The cap table is, in a real sense, a family tree.
Her Instagram bio leads with "Mom x3" and ends with CEO. The order is on purpose. The calendar, presumably, is not.
She has presented to the U.S. Senate on women entrepreneurship. The same week she was probably on a manufacturing call about gelatin viscosity.
The blueprint came from a bridal shop in Puerto Rico. She watched her grandmother build a business there as a kid. That is the original Series A.
Boards at Epicenter, LifeScienceTN, Shelby Farms Park Conservancy and Agape. Either she sleeps four hours a night or Memphis is smaller than it looks.
Most American biotechs cluster around Boston, San Francisco, or San Diego. SweetBio sits on Highland Street in Memphis, in a research park attached to the University of Memphis. The location is deliberate. Memphis is one of the country's most underserved healthcare markets and one of its largest logistics hubs. The patient population is exactly the one APIS was designed for. The shipping infrastructure is what every medical device company eventually needs and rarely lives near.
Graff has used her platform to argue that Memphis can be a serious life-sciences city. The investment is starting to follow the argument. SweetBio's own funders include VamosVentures and FedEx-aligned community capital. It is the kind of pattern that sounds like a press release until you notice it has held for a decade.
460 S Highland St
Memphis, Tennessee 38111
Setting: University of Memphis CommuniTech Research Park.
Closest celebrity neighbor: Graceland is a twenty-minute drive south. The patch and the King share a zip code-adjacent address.
The honest version of SweetBio's mission is a flywheel. Cheaper bandages mean more patients can afford them. More patients mean more clinical evidence. More clinical evidence means more insurance coverage. More coverage means more patients, again. The patch is the product. The flywheel is the company. Graff is the operator who keeps it spinning.
Her next chapters look less like new science and more like distribution. Direct-to-consumer through VERIS. Larger hospital systems through APIS. International approvals after that. The pace is set by the speed of regulatory bodies, which is a polite way of saying patience is the founder's most-used muscle.
She also keeps showing up in advocacy rooms. Women entrepreneurship at the U.S. Senate. Latina founder panels at HOLA!. Boards across Tennessee. The throughline is consistent. Build the company, and build the conditions under which the next ten companies like it can exist.
Boring in the way that gauze is boring. Cheap, available, unremarkable, used by everyone. The opposite of how advanced wound care looks today.