Tao Fu

The Operator Who Decided to Build His Own

Most biotech companies are started by scientists who pick up business along the way. Tao Fu did it in the other order. He trained as a biologist, spent 25 years learning how drugs actually get discovered, financed, negotiated, and sold, and then went back to the lab bench idea he believed in and built a company around it. That company is Attovia Therapeutics, and by the spring of 2025 it had raised roughly $255 million to prove the idea works.

Fu is the founder, chief executive officer, and president of Attovia, based in San Carlos, California. The company describes itself plainly: it develops next-generation biotherapeutics for immune-mediated diseases. What makes it worth watching is the engine underneath - a proprietary platform the company calls ATTOBODY, and the specific bet Fu has placed on how antibodies should be designed.

To understand the bet, it helps to understand the person making it. Fu's résumé reads less like a straight line and more like four overlapping careers. He studied biology as an undergraduate at Tsinghua University in Beijing, then earned a master's degree in biology from the University of Rochester. Somewhere along the way he decided the science alone was not enough, and added an MBA in finance and marketing from Vanderbilt University. He is also a Chartered Financial Analyst. It is an unusual combination - the CFA charter and the biology master's rarely share a business card.

From McKinsey to the Corner Office

Fu began his professional life as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, the kind of first job that teaches you to break big problems into parts. From there he moved into the industry he had studied, taking business and corporate development roles at Scios Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, then rising to vice president of business and corporate development at Bristol Myers Squibb. These are the jobs where deals get done - licensing, partnerships, acquisitions - and they gave Fu a front-row view of how a molecule becomes a medicine and a medicine becomes a business.

The scope kept widening. At Portola Pharmaceuticals he served as executive vice president and chief commercial and business officer, running commercial operations, sales, and business development. Then came Zai Lab, the fast-growing biopharma bridging China and the West, where Fu held one of the broadest mandates of his career. He was president and chief operating officer, and later chief strategy officer, responsible for strategy, operations, business development, manufacturing and quality, and a range of corporate functions.

By the time Fu founded Attovia, he had done nearly every job in the building except run the whole thing. Strategy at McKinsey. Dealmaking at BMS. Commercial at Portola. Operations at Zai Lab. Founding a company is often described as a leap into the unknown, but for Fu it looked more like assembly - taking pieces he had gathered over two and a half decades and putting them to work under one roof, on a problem he chose himself.

The Idea: Engineer Where, Not Just How Tightly

The science thesis behind Attovia is easy to state and hard to execute. Conventional antibody engineering focuses heavily on affinity - how tightly a molecule grabs its target. Attovia's ATTOBODY platform adds a second axis: spatial positioning. An Attobody is built from two single heavy-chain-only antibody fragments, known as VHH domains, connected by a linker. Each fragment binds a different spot, or epitope, on the same target protein at the same time. Binding two functional sites at once - a biparatopic approach - is meant to deliver ultra-high, picomolar affinity while opening the door to multispecific designs and a tunable half-life.

In practice, that combination is aimed at a real patient problem: biologics that bind harder, last longer in the body, and can be dosed less often. For chronic immune-mediated conditions, where patients may take a drug for years, less frequent dosing is not a footnote. It is part of the value.

A Pipeline Moving Into Humans

Ideas are cheap in biotech; clinical data is not. Under Fu, Attovia has moved from platform to programs. Its lead candidate, ATTO-1310, is a first-in-class anti-IL-31 biologic that entered Phase 1 for chronic pruritus of unknown origin - persistent, hard-to-treat itch. A second program, ATTO-3712, is a first-in-class bispecific targeting both IL-13 and IL-31, with a Phase 1 study slated to begin in the second half of 2025 in atopic dermatitis. An earlier-stage candidate, ATTO-004, targets inflammatory bowel disease.

Two Rounds, Three Years

Funding is where Fu's operating background shows most clearly. Building a biotech in the mid-2020s meant raising money in a market that had turned cautious. Attovia raised an oversubscribed $105 million Series B in 2024, led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives. Then in April 2025 it closed a $90 million Series C led by Deep Track Capital, with new investors including Vida Ventures, Sanofi Ventures, and Mirae Asset Capital Life Science joining existing backers such as Frazier Life Sciences, venBio, Nextech, Cormorant, EcoR1, Marshall Wace, and Illumina Ventures. Together with the Series A, the rounds bring Attovia's total capital raised to roughly $255 million.

Fu's own words about the Series C are worth reading closely, because every phrase is an operating decision. Advance the programs "expeditiously." Expand the pipeline "judiciously." Pursue partnerships. Runway, in his telling, is not just cash in the bank - it is the freedom to move at the pace the science demands without being forced into a bad deal. Investors backing the round were, in effect, betting on that judgment as much as on the molecules.

Beyond Attovia, Fu keeps a hand in the broader ecosystem. He serves as a venture partner with Frazier Life Sciences, one of the firm's investors, and sits on the board of Tr1X Inc. Those roles keep him close to the flow of new science and new companies - the same vantage point that, years ago, helped him recognize the idea worth building a company around.

What He Is Really Building

Strip away the platform jargon and the financing headlines, and Attovia is an argument about focus. Fu spent a career helping large organizations manage sprawling portfolios. With Attovia he chose the opposite: a single technical idea, a small pipeline aimed at immune-mediated diseases with high unmet need, and a deliberate pace backed by enough capital to hold his line. The name itself points at the philosophy. "Atto" is the metric prefix for a quintillionth - 10 to the minus 18 - a nod to precision at almost unimaginably small scales. It is a fitting label for a company whose entire premise is doing one thing more precisely than the field has managed before.

Whether the ATTOBODY bet pays off will be decided in clinical data over the next several years, not in press releases. But the shape of the wager is clear, and so is the person behind it: an operator who spent 25 years learning the whole board before deciding, finally, to play his own game.

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