Piers Ingram and the distance between an idea and a company

Before Piers Ingram helped launch a company with $187 million, he worked on a smaller question: who should buy a young company's technology first? It was an MBA field project. The company was AyoxxA. Ingram and fellow student Swati Sawjiany were helping its team think through a market entry. The useful answer was researchers. A scientific invention needed a customer, and choosing that customer was work of its own.

There is something pleasingly unglamorous about this beginning. Entrepreneurship tends to acquire a soundtrack once the financing arrives. Here, the action was in asking why a scientist would want a product and where a business ought to start. Ingram brought a scientific background to a commercial problem. Years later, those two ways of thinking would still sit together on his résumé.

Today, the British scientist and entrepreneur is associated with two companies: Hummingbird Bioscience and Callio Therapeutics. He co-founded both with Jerome Boyd-Kirkup. He remains Hummingbird's CEO. At Callio, he was the founding chief executive; in September 2026, he moved into a senior advisory role while retaining his board seat. His career has acquired an unusual rhythm: learn a discipline, move into another, then build organizations that need both.

The customer before the company

During his INSEAD MBA, Ingram took the Entrepreneurial Field Study elective. AyoxxA had technology with several possible markets. That abundance was itself a difficulty. A startup has to choose where to spend its money and attention long before it can serve everyone who might eventually find its work useful.

Ingram's contribution was to press the commercial question from the scientist's side. What would make researchers interested? His fellow adviser brought financial modeling and location analysis. Their project put different training around the same table, with a practical decision at the center.

The relationship lasted beyond the classroom assignment. AyoxxA's co-founder and CEO, Andreas Schmidt, later described Ingram as someone he continued to talk to. An elective had become a connection. It is a small episode, but a revealing one: before he was running a company, Ingram was already working at the junction between technical possibility and an organization capable of selling it.

A mathematician collects other languages

Ingram studied mathematics at Imperial College London, then added an MSc in bioinformatics and a PhD in systems biology. His doctorate was funded by the Wellcome Trust. The combination crossed from mathematical reasoning into computation and the study of interacting biological systems. It was an education in relationships as well as individual components.

He stayed in academia after his doctorate. Between 2008 and 2010, he was a research fellow and then acting research group head at Imperial's Centre for Integrative Systems Biology. Those titles describe a progression from doing research toward taking responsibility for a group's work. They also put a university chapter before the consulting and corporate chapters that followed.

His INSEAD MBA belongs to the class of 2011. From 2011 to 2013, he was a manager in Monitor Group's strategy consulting practice. He then became Sanofi's head of strategic planning for Southeast Asia, a role he held from 2013 to 2015. The geographic scale had changed, along with the job description.

On paper, it is a crowded set of qualifications: three Imperial degrees, an MBA, academic leadership, consulting, regional strategy. The interesting part is how often Ingram crossed an institutional boundary. A university, a consultancy and a multinational each ask different things of an idea. His next chapter would require him to bring that experience into a company he helped create.

Two founders, one Singapore base

Ingram and Boyd-Kirkup founded Hummingbird in Singapore in 2015. Their starting conviction concerned a gap between academic tools and their use in industry. They believed that emerging computational methods and richer datasets were opening possibilities that businesses had yet to use fully. The company was their attempt to put those capabilities to work together.

Boyd-Kirkup brought his own combination of computational and experimental experience. He had studied biochemistry at Imperial and completed a doctorate at Cambridge. Ingram's mathematical and strategic training joined that background in a partnership that would extend across more than a decade and, eventually, a second company.

Ingram has been careful about treating any individual technique as a universal answer. In a 2021 interview, he put it plainly:

“no single approach will ever be a silver bullet”

Piers Ingram · 2021

That qualification matters in a field where a new tool can quickly become an entire sales pitch. His explanation emphasized using methods together and asking what extra understanding they provided.

Singapore was a deliberate base. Ingram has pointed to the government's support for building a bioscience business community, while later describing the advantage of maintaining technical depth locally and working internationally. The address was part of the operating plan. The company could build a team in one place and establish relationships far beyond it.

The square footage of an idea

By May 2021, Hummingbird had raised a $125 million Series C led by Novo Holdings. New and returning investors joined the round, including Frazier Healthcare Partners, EDBI, Amgen Ventures, SK Inc and Heritas Capital. Novo's participation was among its first investments in a privately held Asian biotechnology company.

Capital also brought people into the company's governance. Kenneth Harrison of Novo Ventures, Dan Estes of Frazier and Kiel Kim of SK joined Hummingbird's board. A financing announcement is often read as a number followed by a list of logos. Here, the list also records the widening circle of people taking responsibility for the business.

The next year, growth had an address and a floor plan. Hummingbird opened a 40,000-square-foot facility at Singapore Science Park, with more than ten laboratories and integrated office space. Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat attended the September 2022 opening. Research and office teams were housed close enough to collaborate across disciplines.

Forty thousand square feet is a useful counterweight to the airy vocabulary surrounding innovation. An expanding company needs rooms, equipment and places for people to work together. The facility made organizational growth visible. The founder who had once helped a startup choose its first market was now leading an enterprise with a substantial physical footprint.

The meeting is part of the work

In a recorded conversation with fellow CEO Andrew Bruce in 2023, Ingram spoke about working with much larger organizations. He described companies willing to sit down several times a year, discuss plans, offer feedback and make introductions. His account gave an unusually practical description of partnership: recurring conversations with people who could help assess the next decision.

There was an acknowledgment of limits, too. A small company could have substantial strength in one area and need experience from outside in another. Ingram described partnerships as a way to make progress while the organization was still building its own capabilities. The business grew through relationships as well as recruitment and financing.

He also participated in public discussions about the mechanics of growth. At ClavystBio's November 2024 Portfolio Day, he joined Adam Gridley and Theresa Heah on a panel about scaling early-stage companies globally. The topic fits his own working history: building from Singapore while assembling the people, capital and connections a company needs elsewhere.

A second company, with a first chapter already written

Callio launched on March 3, 2025, with a $187 million Series A led by Frazier Life Sciences. Jeito Capital participated significantly, alongside Novo Holdings, Omega Funds, ClavystBio, Platanus, Norwest, Pureos Bioventures, SEEDS Capital and EDBI. Its founding headquarters were in Seattle and Singapore.

The corporate arrangement explains why this second company arrived with so much already in place. Callio licensed technology and intellectual property from Hummingbird through an exclusive worldwide agreement. Hummingbird received equity and the possibility of milestone payments and royalties. Work developed inside one organization gained a new corporate structure and a separate investor group.

Ingram became CEO and Boyd-Kirkup chief scientific officer. Naomi Hunder and Angèle Maki completed the founding executive team in their respective roles. The familiar co-founders were joined by colleagues with experience from other companies. Callio combined an established working partnership with a newly assembled organization.

Hummingbird also received recognition that year as one of ten winners of the 2025 World Intellectual Property Organization Global Awards. The awards drew 780 applications from 95 countries. For the company Ingram had helped build, the recognition concerned the commercial use of intellectual property, a subject that had become central to Callio's creation.

The founder changes seats

On September 9, 2026, Callio appointed Zachary Hornby CEO. Ingram transitioned to senior advisor and continued on the board. Boyd-Kirkup moved to a senior scientific advisory role. Both continued leading Hummingbird in their existing executive positions.

The change gives Ingram's Callio chapter a clear sequence: co-found the business, lead its launch, then remain involved as another executive takes over. The founding CEO title describes a specific contribution. His advisory and board roles carry that contribution into the company's next period without preserving the same daily job.

Across the larger career, the recurring work is connecting things that arrive separately: technical training and commercial judgment, a Singapore base and international capital, a long-running partnership and new colleagues. The MBA project began with a question about where an invention should go first. Two companies later, Ingram is still working on the arrangements that allow an idea to travel.