In July 2025, Stefano Gulla had something to celebrate. Kling Biotherapeutics, the Amsterdam company where he serves as Chief Scientific Officer, had announced a collaboration with Sanofi. On LinkedIn, he described the agreement as recognition of the company’s platform. Then he did something more revealing than reciting the deal: he named the people who had helped make the work possible.
Alessandra Villa. Casper Marsman. Jurgen Heinen. Kelly Maijoor. Four names in a post that could easily have been occupied by one executive’s congratulations to himself. Gulla described the privilege of leading the platform team and its scientific development. The agreement supplied the occasion; the colleagues supplied the substance. A corporate announcement acquired a little human scale.
Gulla had already occupied the chair most associated with a founder’s authority. At Abcuro, the company he co-founded in Massachusetts, he served as both CEO and CSO. His career has since carried him through further industry roles and into scientific leadership in the Netherlands. The interesting movement is between responsibilities: researcher, project leader, founder, executive, and leader of another company’s science.
It is tempting to read such a career as a ladder, with each new title placed neatly above the last. Gulla’s looks more like a route through adjoining rooms. The laboratory, the company office and the investor meeting all appear along the way. By the time he reached Kling, he had experience on several sides of the same enterprise: doing research, organizing it and helping finance the organization around it.
Before the corner office, a place in the lab
The academic foundation was in Boston. Gulla earned a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and a doctorate at Northeastern University, then completed postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Northeastern supplied two degrees; MIT supplied a further research setting. These are distinct stages, and the distinction matters in a career whose later titles can otherwise crowd out the earlier work.
At MIT, he belonged to Amy Keating’s laboratory. His name remains on its list of former postdoctoral researchers, among graduate students, technicians and other alumni. A laboratory roster is a pleasingly unceremonious form of biography. Everyone gets a name and a role. There is no room for the lengthy executive introduction, and the work takes place in company.
The lab’s publication record also places Gulla among the co-authors of a 2010 paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology. His collaborators included Sanjib Dutta, T. Scott Chen, Emiko Fire, Robert A. Grant and Keating. The paper belongs to the record of his research training, before the fundraising rounds and chief officer appointments became the more visible markers of his career.
The publication appeared in May 2010, in volume 398 of the Journal of Molecular Biology. It provides a dated marker of Gulla’s work with the Keating group. The author list also shows the research as a shared undertaking, with his name alongside five collaborators rather than standing alone.
That sequence gives the subsequent business roles a particular context. He entered industry with experience of collaborative academic research. A publication carries multiple authors because the work has multiple contributors. Years later, his Sanofi announcement would have its own list of contributors. The formats differ considerably; the practice of putting names beside the work offers a small connection between them.
A founder’s name at the bottom of the form
Industry followed academia. His work history includes Pfizer, Agenus, the Flagship ecosystem and RVAC. The documented sequence includes project leadership at Pfizer, program and portfolio work at Agenus, a later director role at Repertoire Immune Medicines, and a vice presidency at RVAC Medicines. Abcuro sits within this history as the company where he also became a founder.
One of the clearest glimpses of his executive responsibility is wonderfully plain. On July 6, 2020, he signed an Abcuro securities filing as President. Beside his name, the document identified him as an executive officer and director. The address belonged to the company in Newton, Massachusetts. No origin myth was required. There was a corporation, an offering and a person authorized to sign.
The signature makes company building tangible. A founder appears in a headline as the person with the idea. In an administrative document, he appears as someone responsible for an organization’s representations. The difference is one of perspective. The public story gives him a role; the form gives that role a task. Even the most interesting enterprise eventually encounters a box that must be completed.
Gulla’s Abcuro history included both the chief executive and chief scientific jobs. Those titles put organizational leadership and research leadership beside one another. They are separate responsibilities that can share a person, especially during a company’s early years. In his case, they help explain why a later CSO appointment could draw on entrepreneurial experience as well as an academic and industrial research background.
January 2021: money and a change of chairs
On January 7, 2021, Abcuro announced a $42 million Series A-1 financing. Mass General Brigham Ventures and Sanofi Ventures co-led the round. Pontifax Venture Capital, Hongsen Investment Group, RA Capital Management and Samsara BioCapital also participated. The announcement paired the financing with appointments: John B. Edwards became Executive Chair, and David de Graaf became Chief Executive Officer.
The combination is the important detail. New capital arrived alongside a change in executive leadership and additions to the board. Jason Hafler, Iyona Rajkomar, Ryan Berry and Donald McCarthy joined directors Julius Knowles and Yajun Xu. Abcuro’s next stage involved a broader group of people with formal roles in its governance. A financing announcement became, at the same time, a seating plan.
For a profile of Gulla, that moment fixes the chronology. He had held the CEO role; de Graaf’s appointment marks a subsequent chapter in the company’s leadership. Founding a company remains part of a person’s history even when another executive takes the chief executive position. The company continues with its own leadership, while the founder’s career can continue elsewhere.
Gulla went on to Repertoire and RVAC before Kling. This gives the years after Abcuro a more interesting shape than a simple departure followed by a new destination. There were intervening roles and organizations. His next appointment in Amsterdam came after further industry experience, rather than directly from the company whose founding is still attached to his name.
Series A-1 financing, announced alongside a new CEO and Executive Chair.
Amsterdam, December 2023
Kling announced his appointment as Chief Scientific Officer on December 5, 2023. The company’s leadership at the time included Chief Executive Officer Michael Koslowski, who welcomed his combination of scientific knowledge and leadership experience. The appointment placed Gulla inside an existing organization, with a scientific remit and a leadership team already around him.
The geographical change is clear too. His earlier academic and company history was closely associated with the Boston area. Kling is headquartered in Amsterdam, and Gulla’s LinkedIn profile lists Amsterdam as his location. The two cities give his career a transatlantic frame without requiring a romantic account of packed suitcases, farewells or a first morning beside a canal.
Kling’s scientific leadership role brought his experience back to the foreground in a different arrangement. At Abcuro, he had been a founder as well as an executive. At Kling, he joined as CSO. The distinction allows the reader to see experience travelling between companies: the person carries his training and previous responsibilities, while the new organization supplies a different team and setting.
A title alone would make this a brief item in the appointments column. The earlier record gives it weight. Postdoctoral research, project leadership, portfolio work and founding experience had all preceded the move. They describe several forms of participation in an enterprise, from contributing to a paper to signing for a corporation. Amsterdam became the next place in which that accumulated experience would be put to work.
- Signs as Abcuro President
- Appointed Kling CSO
- Kling announces Sanofi collaboration
Four names beside a deal
The Sanofi collaboration, announced on July 24, 2025, brought an outside partner into Kling’s work. The agreement included a collaboration and a license option. Gulla’s response concentrated on the platform team and the scientific evolution he had helped lead. His public satisfaction was specific: a major industry partner had recognized the value of work developed by that team.
He wrote that recognition from a major industry company was rewarding. The observation was tied to an identifiable event. It belongs to a post about an agreement that had actually been announced. Around it are the colleagues’ names and an account of his role. That combination gives the reader something sturdier than a free-floating statement about ambition.
The post is also a useful point at which to return to the founder story. Gulla’s career has not stayed within the company he helped create, or within the chief executive title he once held. It has continued through new organizations and a new city. At Kling, the public milestone is a partnership, and his own account of it makes room for the people carrying out the work.
There is a modest pleasure in that ending. Executive biographies often compress years into a procession of titles, each announced with the same air of arrival. Here, the career opens back out into a group of names. The former CEO is a CSO in Amsterdam, pleased about a deal and explicit about his colleagues. After all the changes of institution, responsibility and address, the team remains in the picture.
“recognize the value of our technology is incredibly rewarding”
Stefano Gulla · July 2025