Yerem Yeghiazarians and the Long Education of a Founder

Yerem Yeghiazarians arrived in the United States as a student who could not speak English. Years later, with degrees, a professorship and a company behind his name, he chose that detail to explain where his working life began. Before the institutional affiliations came the practical business of making himself understood. It is a useful opening for a founder whose advice to other founders includes listening carefully to other people.

His career now stretches from Brandeis University to Johns Hopkins, from Boston to San Francisco, and from an academic laboratory to the chief executive’s chair at Soley Therapeutics. Read those stops quickly and they look like a succession of credentials. Slow down and another story appears: a long apprenticeship, a collaboration that preceded the company by years, and a willingness to enter a job for which even a substantial résumé cannot supply every answer.

He co-founded Soley in 2020 with Kurosh Ameri, a fellow UCSF scientist. In January 2026, the company announced a $200 million Series C financing. The sum provides an obvious place to begin a business profile. Yeghiazarians’s own account begins much earlier, with the student learning a new language. The distance between those two moments is where the more interesting part of his story lives.

Boston before the Bay

At Brandeis, Yeghiazarians studied biology and biochemistry, graduating in 1991. Johns Hopkins followed, with his M.D. in 1995. He then trained at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, serving as chief resident and an instructor. These were successive stages in an education that continued well beyond the point at which most graduates have stopped counting examinations.

He joined UCSF in 2003. There, his work grew to include teaching, mentoring and directing a research program. The institutional geography matters: his later company did not emerge directly from an undergraduate idea or a short encounter at a networking event. It followed years spent working inside universities, where an interesting question can acquire collaborators, equipment, grant applications and an unusually long calendar.

A long academic career also leaves a written trail. Yeghiazarians has published more than 110 peer-reviewed papers and edited two books. Editing is a revealing companion to research. A paper asks colleagues to examine a particular piece of work; a book asks its editor to arrange a larger conversation so that other people can follow it. Both require a reader to be taken seriously.

These roles make the later move into entrepreneurship more substantial than a change of stationery. Running a company brings decisions about hiring, capital and infrastructure into the same working day. Academic standing travels with the founder, but it cannot do those jobs on his behalf. The accumulated knowledge becomes a starting resource. A new organization still has to be built.

A partnership older than the company

Yeghiazarians and Ameri began their UCSF collaboration in 2010. Their company arrived a decade later. That order is central to understanding Yeghiazarians as a founder: the relationship and the work had an established history before there was a business to introduce. By the time they became co-founders, they had already spent years approaching a shared research problem from different scientific backgrounds.

There is an appealingly unfashionable pace to that chronology. A decade does not make a convenient launch countdown. It contains enough time for methods to be developed, questioned and revised, and for a partnership to become part of everyday professional life. Across the years from 2011 to 2020, the team built and validated the research platform that would underpin Soley.

In a March 2026 reflection accompanying a podcast interview, Yeghiazarians described stepping beyond academia as a way to continue a longstanding inquiry. That description gives the transition a particular character. The underlying work supplied the reason for the move. Becoming a chief executive added a new set of responsibilities to something he had already spent a considerable part of his career pursuing.

The co-founders’ photograph offers a straightforward counterpart to the chronology: Yeghiazarians on the left, Ameri on the right, standing together. Business portraits tend to make a partnership look instantaneous. This one belongs beside a timeline. Before either person could be described as Soley’s co-founder, the two had already accumulated a substantial shared working history.

The students in the story

Company building is only one way a working life extends beyond its owner. By 2018, Yeghiazarians’s work included teaching and mentorship, including training Armenian students who went on to accomplishments of their own. The detail places other careers inside his story. His influence also passed through people who were developing their own expertise.

He has spoken of his Armenian identity with pride. His work with Armenian students connects that identity to the practical activity of training another generation. It gives the idea of professional connection a more specific meaning than a contact list: time spent working with someone at an earlier stage, followed by the possibility that their work will take them somewhere different.

At UCSF, Sunil P. Singh worked in Yeghiazarians’s laboratory during his fellowship and named him among his mentors in 2018. That is a modest but concrete glimpse of the teaching relationship. Mentorship can become a ceremonial word in a biography. Here it has a location, a colleague and work being done together. The professor was helping another researcher acquire experience, alongside producing research of his own.

When the laboratory needs a larger address book

As Soley developed, Yeghiazarians’s circle of collaborators expanded beyond academia. Oracle publicly announced its collaboration with the company in March 2025, describing plans to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and NVIDIA technology to scale its computing capabilities. The announcement put the co-founder in a different institutional conversation, involving the infrastructure required to support a growing organization.

For a researcher becoming an executive, that is a consequential enlargement of the job. Work that begins with a question eventually needs systems capable of supporting many people working on it. Computing, storage and engineering become organizational decisions. The equipment has to serve the work, and somebody has to decide how the pieces fit together. A founder’s curiosity acquires a purchasing department.

Then came the January 2026 financing. Surveyor Capital was the primary investor in the $200 million Series C, with new participants including HRTG Partners and RWN Management. Returning investors included Breyer Capital, GordonMD Global Investments and the Doug Leone Family Fund. Wilson Sonsini advised Soley on the transaction. Around the two scientists now sat a much wider group of professional participants.

The financing belongs to the company, and its significance in Yeghiazarians’s personal story is the responsibility attached to it. More resources mean more decisions about people, priorities and execution. The number is easy to put in large type. What follows is harder to compress: the continuing task of making an organization work, with colleagues whose experience extends well beyond the founder’s own.

The résumé still needs room for other people

His public advice to founders gives an unusually practical view of that task. In a February 2026 interview, Yeghiazarians described being personally involved in hiring and recalled a position that attracted more than 800 candidates. Soley hired one person. It is an anecdote with a very different rhythm from a financing announcement: a long field of possibilities, a choice, and another colleague joining the work.

He also cautioned against repeatedly changing direction in response to whatever another company happens to be doing. Each turn consumes time, effort and money. There is a recognizable management problem here: a founder must hear new information without allowing every new conversation to reorganize the entire business. Curiosity needs to coexist with a plan that colleagues can actually carry out.

“The most important thing is knowing your own limitations.”

Yerem Yeghiazarians · on leadership

Coming from someone with a lengthy academic record, it is a useful piece of perspective. Credentials can establish what a person has learned. Building a team requires attention to the knowledge and experience that other people must bring.

A Boston allegiance survives the move west

Outside his professional biography, Yeghiazarians lists family time, travel and Boston sports among his interests. The last detail gives his years in Massachusetts a continuing presence in a life now based in San Francisco. Geography can change faster than sporting loyalties. A California address apparently does not oblige its owner to renegotiate every attachment acquired on the East Coast.

He also lists English, Armenian, French and Persian among his languages. Set beside his account of arriving in America without English, that list supplies a small, satisfying change of scale. An early obstacle sits within a much larger repertoire. It is a biographical detail that needs no invented scene at an airport, no imagined conversation and no declaration about destiny.

By March 2026, he was discussing his journey on The BioHub podcast with Tom Weir. The episode places the entrepreneur alongside the professor and researcher, allowing the stages of the career to be considered together. Yeghiazarians’s story has room for all of them: the student learning English, the teacher working with younger colleagues, the longtime collaborator and the executive responsible for a growing company.

The student’s education has become a founder’s education. Its subjects now include infrastructure, investment and hiring, and its teachers include people with experience he does not possess. After decades in institutions devoted to learning, Yeghiazarians has found another setting in which there is plenty left to learn. His own advice suggests that he considers that a reasonable condition of the job.