A finance guy who never left the lab, and a scientist who learned to read a term sheet.
In October 2025, a New York biotech called Nilo Therapeutics walked out of stealth with $101 million and a sentence that sounds like science fiction: it wants to treat autoimmune disease by sending signals through the brain. The person handed the keys was Kim Seth, Ph.D. - a founding CEO whose entire career had been a rehearsal for exactly this kind of bet.
Most biotech launches lead with the molecule. Nilo led with a nerve. The company's thesis sits on top of a 2024 paper in Nature, out of founder Charles Zuker's lab at Columbia, that mapped a body-brain circuit running along the vagus nerve - the longest nerve in the body, stretching from the brainstem down into the gut. The finding: specific vagal neurons act like a thermostat for systemic inflammation. Seth's job is to turn that thermostat into a drug.
He is, by training, an unlikely person to be running a company and an obvious one. Seth holds a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Harvard's Division of Medical Sciences. He also holds a cum laude economics degree from Harvard College, with a stop at the Ecole Polytechnique in France along the way. The combination - wet-lab fluency plus the language of capital markets - is rare enough that it reads almost like a casting decision.
The Goldman years, then Pfizer, then the long apprenticeship
Seth started where a lot of science-literate economists start: on Wall Street. He covered large-cap and specialty pharmaceuticals as a research analyst at Goldman Sachs, learning to value the very companies he would later help build. From there he moved inside the industry, taking leadership roles in business development, strategy and operations across a string of biopharma companies, including Pfizer.
The role that made his name came at Repare Therapeutics, a precision-oncology company where he served as Chief Business Officer and, later, Executive Vice President and Head of Business and Corporate Development. He was there for the whole arc - pre-Series A, through Series B, through the IPO. He stood up the company's U.S. business operations from scratch. And he ran the deals.
The numbers tell that story cleanly: more than $250 million in financing pulled in through global platform, asset and clinical partnerships, deals that represented over $4 billion in total potential value, with partners that included Roche and Bristol Myers Squibb. Seth was the person in the room who could explain the biology and then negotiate the milestones on it.
“Together with Laurens, our world-class scientific founders, and our investors, we are building a company positioned to deliver a new generation of therapies that harness the brain-immune axis to transform the treatment of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions.”
— Kim Seth, on launching Nilo TherapeuticsWhy the brain, and why now
For decades, immunology drugs have followed one logic: find a single pathway driving the disease, and block it. It works, until the body routes around it and resistance creeps in. Nilo's pitch flips the frame. Instead of silencing one pathway at a time, it aims at the central circuit that helps coordinate many of them at once - the brain-body axis that the Zuker lab and others have been steadily decoding.
The idea, in three moves: read the body's inflammatory state, route that signal through neural circuits, and let the brain restore balance - instead of brute-forcing a single molecular target.
It is an early, audacious idea - the kind that usually struggles to find money precisely because it is early and audacious. That it raised nine figures says as much about the investors' conviction in the science as about their conviction in Seth. The founding scientific bench is a who's-who of sensory and immune biology: Charles Zuker of Columbia, Ruslan Medzhitov of Yale, and Steve Liberles of Harvard. The chief scientific officer, Laurens Kruidenier, held the same title at Cellarity and Prometheus Biosciences.
From the back room to the front of the company
There is a quiet career inflection buried in all this. For 25 years, Seth was the dealmaker - the indispensable person who scaled other founders' companies, structured other people's partnerships, and built the operational scaffolding that let scientists chase their ideas. At Nilo, for the first time, the company is his to run. The economist, the neurobiologist, the analyst, the operator: all of those roles finally point at the same job title.
The work ahead is unglamorous in the way early biotech always is. The Series A will go toward standing up laboratories in New York City, expanding the research and development team, and pushing preclinical drug programs toward the clinic. No approved drug, no late-stage trial, no victory lap - just a thesis, a balance sheet, and a deadline measured in years. Which, given his resume, appears to be exactly the kind of problem Kim Seth went looking for.
An economics degree and a neurobiology PhD from the same university - then Wall Street, to analyze the industry he would later build inside.
The Gates Foundation joined the round, an unusual backer for a venture-stage immunology startup.
At Repare he saw a company through every stage of its life, the rare operator who was there start to finish.
Nilo's whole strategy rests on a 2024 Nature paper about the vagus nerve - basic science most funds call too early.