Adam Freund

Adam Freund is the founder and CEO of Arda Therapeutics, a San Carlos biotech built on a simple, contrarian bet: many chronic diseases are caused by specific cells gone wrong, so the cure is to find and delete those cells while leaving healthy tissue intact. A molecular biologist with a Berkeley PhD and a Stanford postdoc, he spent seven years at Google-backed Calico Life Sciences, where he helped grow the company from roughly 15 to 200-plus people and started its most advanced anti-aging therapeutic program. In late 2021 he left to start Arda as a solo founder with a deck and a thesis, and by October 2024 had raised a $43M Series A led by a16z Bio + Health. His tools are single-cell sequencing to map disease cell-by-cell and antibodies to do the deleting.