Neil Dhawan went to see someone who could not write the cheque he was looking for. Jason Pontin was at Flagship Pioneering, a firm that developed its ideas internally and was doing no outside investment. On the narrow question of whether this was a promising fundraising appointment, the answer was unhelpful. On the larger question of what a conversation might become, things were more interesting.
Pontin had spent years editing and publishing technology journalism. He was interested in Dhawan’s chemistry. The meeting connected a scientist trying to build a business with someone accustomed to asking what an unfamiliar idea meant and whether it deserved attention. Pontin later helped Dhawan raise money and became a co-founder of Totus Medicines. A calendar appointment had acquired a rather substantial afterlife.
The episode makes a useful entrance into Dhawan’s career because it puts another person in the frame immediately. Company histories tend to start with the founder’s conviction and end with a financing announcement. Here, between the two, was a former editor whose employer’s investment policy seemed to rule out the obvious outcome. The conversation remained useful even after the obvious outcome had been removed.
A company before the doctorate
Dhawan had already taken part in turning academic work into a company. In October 2013, Mount Sinai and BioMotiv announced Dual Therapeutics. The announcement named him among its co-founders, alongside Goutham Narla, Michael Ohlmeyer, Matthew Galsky, David Kastrinsky and Yiannis Ioannou. Dhawan was still a student. His first documented company-building experience arrived before the ceremony that would place a doctorate after his name.
Dual was based on intellectual property licensed from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. That arrangement brought together a university team and an outside organization with business experience. Even before Totus, Dhawan’s working world included people whose responsibilities differed from those of the researchers around him. A discovery had to move through agreements, licensing and company formation. The experiment was only one part of the undertaking.
His education also included a bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University and a master’s at Mount Sinai. On June 21, 2016, his dissertation defense appeared on the calendar for Davis Auditorium, from three to four in the afternoon. Arvin Dar was listed as his mentor. An hour on an academic events page is a pleasantly modest container for years of work.
The dates give his early career an unusual order. He did not complete his training, put away the books and then begin thinking about a business. The business experience and the academic training overlapped. That overlap matters: it placed company-building inside his education rather than leaving it as a later change of profession. His résumé may separate the entries. His calendar had less opportunity to do so.
An investor with no cheque to offer
By the time Dhawan approached Pontin, he could bring more than an untested enthusiasm for entrepreneurship. He had participated in a university spinout and worked within a research environment. Pontin brought a different preparation. Before venture capital, he had run MIT Technology Review and worked at other publications. His professional history had required him to make technical ideas intelligible to people outside the room where they originated.
Those backgrounds offered different ways of looking at the same proposal. A scientist could explain how an idea worked. An editor could ask why someone else should care about it, where it fitted and what would have to happen next. It is easy to imagine company-building as a search for people who already think alike. Dhawan and Pontin’s partnership offers a more varied picture of the skills around a founding table.
DCVC dates their co-founding of Totus to 2020. There was work before that date: the company’s design partner says its relationship with Totus began in 2019. Later, Dhawan described eight years of building in his 2025 transition announcement. A company can have several beginnings - the first idea, the first collaboration, the first investment and the day the public learns its name. They need not all fit in one anniversary.
The business of assembling people
Totus’s public launch came in December 2021, with a $40 million Series A led by DCVC Bio and Northpond Ventures. Dhawan was its founding CEO. The number marked a change in the scale of the undertaking. Money brought the possibility of employing more people, organizing more work and giving a young company a longer horizon. It also brought a constituency that expected the organization to keep functioning beyond its founding excitement.
The visual identity had received attention, too. One Design worked on naming, positioning, facility branding and documentation of team culture. Its Totus wordmark could be reconfigured, with a pattern drawn from molecular structure. For a scientist-founder, there is a certain amusement in reaching the point where the organization requires both experiments and decisions about how its walls should look. Companies acquire practical needs with remarkable speed.
In March 2022, Totus announced a partnership with Mila, the Quebec artificial intelligence institute. The relationship connected the company’s scientific expertise with a research community in computing. It also had a people dimension: the announcement described access to talent and possible future hires. Building a technical platform meant building relationships with people who understood parts of the problem differently.
Dhawan’s role increasingly included public conversation. He appeared on the December 2021 Black in Deep Tech Life Sciences Summit agenda. In 2023, he was named day-one chair at Future of R&D Week in Boston and scheduled for a discussion about managing the culture around AI. The subjects extended beyond a single experiment. How people worked together had become a matter for the person running the company.
While a student
Founding CEO
CEO handover
Operating transition
A founder changes seats
In December 2023, Totus announced two developments together: a $66 million Series B and the appointment of Nassim Usman as President and CEO. Dhawan would become Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Research and Development, overseeing the platform, programs and data. The organization was dividing responsibilities differently. Its founder remained involved, with his remit more explicitly centered on the scientific work.
“Nassim is exactly the right leader for Totus.”Neil Dhawan, December 2023
A founding title has considerable emotional weight in the usual telling of entrepreneurship. The handover provides a less theatrical, more practical event to consider. Usman’s arrival placed another experienced executive at the top of the organization. Dhawan’s continued responsibility connected the company’s next stage with the work that had brought it there. The decision was visible in an organizational chart, but its usefulness would have to be expressed through everyday cooperation.
In May 2024, Totus announced a research collaboration with Lilly. Dhawan publicly thanked Katie Hewitt and Nisha Nanda for their partnership. The names are worth pausing over. A corporate agreement can read as if two logos met, shook hands and signed something. His acknowledgement restores the people who had worked across that boundary. It also fits the recurring shape of his career: an idea advances through relationships as well as through work at a bench.
Later, Dhawan announced that he would leave his day-to-day operating role while continuing to guide strategy as a board member. Totus echoed that change in its own announcement. Its current company page lists him among the directors. The sequence now contains several distinct responsibilities: founding CEO, scientific leader, board member. Each describes a different way of participating in the company he helped create.
The file Jimmy kept
Dhawan’s transition announcement thanked colleagues past and present, including Jimmy Blair, Tom Hughes, Daisy Chhokar, Usman, Zelanna Goldberg and Simon Harnest. In the comments, Blair supplied a smaller piece of company history. He remembered an early successful experiment at LabCentral. He still had the file. Beside an announcement about an executive transition, here was a colleague remembering something they had made work years earlier.
The detail is more revealing than another round number. A file is evidence that a particular piece of work happened, on a particular day, before the company’s later chapters were available for anyone to read. Keeping it suggests the significance of that moment to Blair without requiring a polished origin myth. The grand corporate archive, apparently, can begin with someone declining to press Delete.
In September 2024, Dhawan had returned to Mount Sinai to deliver a keynote at its Lab Coat Ceremony. The occasion placed an alumnus who had built companies in front of students beginning their own research training. His practical advice included an uncomplicated instruction: “put your head down and do the work”. Coming from someone whose first company predated his doctorate, it had the benefit of a career behind it.
Work, in this story, takes several forms. There is the academic work recorded in a defense calendar, the conversation with a possible backer, the task of assembling a team and the decision to hand responsibilities to someone else. Dhawan’s career makes room for all of them. Somewhere in that history is a meeting without an available cheque. Somewhere else is a file Jimmy Blair kept. Both belong in the account of how Totus became a company.