Zoar
Engelman

Start with the nerve, not the pump

Most people who think about heart failure think about the heart. A tired muscle, a weak squeeze, a pump that can't keep up. Zoar Engelman looked somewhere less obvious. He looked at the nervous system that keeps flooring the accelerator, and at the reservoir of blood pooling in the abdomen, and decided that the problem might not be the pump at all. It might be the plumbing, and the wiring that controls it.

That instinct - go one layer deeper than everyone else is looking - is the through-line of a twenty-year career.

In September 2025, Axon Therapies, the clinical-stage company Engelman co-founded, closed an oversubscribed $32 million Series A. On the same beat, he moved from Chief Scientific Officer into the CEO chair. It's an unusual promotion. The scientist who understood the mechanism best became the person responsible for carrying the whole thing to market. Axon builds a procedure called SAVM - Splanchnic Ablation for Volume Management - delivered through a catheter-based, implant-free system called Satera. The pitch is simple even if the biology isn't: quiet an overactive sympathetic nervous system, let the body redistribute its own blood volume, and give a struggling heart room to breathe.

The specific target is heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, HFpEF, a form of the disease where the heart looks like it's pumping fine on the scan and the patient still can't climb the stairs. It has resisted nearly every drug thrown at it. That resistance is precisely what drew Engelman in. Easy problems get solved by the crowd. The stubborn ones wait for someone willing to reframe the question.

What SAVM actually does

The sympathetic nervous system is your body's emergency response. In a healthy person it flares up and then settles. In heart failure it never lets go - it keeps signaling for more constriction, more volume, more pressure, long after the emergency is over. Axon's approach targets the splanchnic nerve, the controller of the large blood reservoir in the abdomen, and eases that signal off.

The design ethic is worth pausing on. The best technology disappears. Axon's device does its job and then leaves - no implant, no ongoing hardware, nothing extra in the body. For an engineer, that restraint is a statement. You don't add machinery to a system that's already overreacting. You take a little away and let biology do the rest.

Salt Lake City to Auckland to Manhattan

The map is longer than most. Engelman started as a research assistant at the University of Utah in 2002, then stacked a bachelor's and a master's in biomedical engineering there before crossing roughly eleven thousand kilometers to earn a PhD in Bioengineering at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Along the way he worked at the Cardiovascular Research and Training Institute and the Auckland Bioengineering Institute - the kind of places where you learn to move fluently between the wet lab, the data, and the math.

That fluency is rare. He's described as excelling across the bench, data analysis, and computational science at once. Most people pick a lane. Engelman kept the ability to carry an idea from a cell to a spreadsheet to a working device without handing it off, which turns out to be exactly the skill you need if you want to invent medical devices for a living.

The venture machine

After Auckland he joined Coridea as a senior biomedical systems engineer in 2011, then became Director of Research at Cibiem, then Chief Science Officer at Coridea, then a co-founder and Chief Science Officer across a string of new companies - Axon Therapies, EP Sciences, Corvent Medical, Deerfield Catalyst. Add it up and it's roughly nine ventures since 2011, and a hand in raising more than $150 million.

Here's the quieter lesson buried in that resume: he didn't build one company and tell the story forever. He treated company-creation itself as a discipline. Find a real, unglamorous, enormous problem. Design a device that addresses the root cause. Raise the money. Repeat. Axon is the latest expression of that method - and the first time he's stepped out from behind the science to run the whole operation.

Three sentences that explain the bet

The condition nobody could crack

To understand why Axon exists, you have to understand what makes HFpEF such a maddening target. In heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, the heart's squeeze is visibly weak, and decades of drugs now blunt the damage. In the preserved-ejection version, the scan looks almost normal. The pumping fraction is fine. And yet the patient is exhausted, short of breath, and cycling in and out of the hospital. The failure is happening in pressures and volumes you can't see on a standard image, which is exactly why so many promising therapies have washed out in trials.

Engelman's answer sidesteps the muscle entirely. If the sympathetic nervous system is the reason volume keeps getting shoved back toward an overloaded heart, then calming that system - not strengthening the pump - becomes the lever. It's a bet on physiology over brute force. It is also the kind of bet that only makes sense to someone who has spent years living inside the wiring diagram of the autonomic nervous system, which Engelman has, across cardiovascular disease, lung disease, critical care, and sleep apnea.

That breadth matters. The same overactive signaling that shows up in heart failure also surfaces in other chronic conditions, and a career spent mapping it from different angles is what lets a founder recognize the pattern and build for it. Axon is narrow in its target and wide in its lineage - the product of a scientist who kept asking the same question in different rooms until the answer got sharp enough to build a company around.

Who's backing him

The $32 million round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Santé Ventures, with existing investor Deerfield Management and additional backers CD Capital and KOFA Healthcare joining. Investors describe Axon's technology as a first-in-class solution aimed at a multi-billion-dollar market and a large, unmet clinical need - the kind of language that only sounds like hype until you remember how few good options HFpEF patients actually have.

Around Engelman sits a leadership team built for the clinical grind ahead: PJ Iranitalab as COO, Matthew Stark leading clinical and regulatory affairs, and Howard Levin as chief medical officer. The company now runs from New York with a European headquarters in Altrincham, in the UK, opened specifically to accelerate clinical trials. Two double-blinded, randomized feasibility studies are planned - one for HFpEF, one for HFrEF - the careful, unglamorous evidence-building that decides whether a clever mechanism becomes an actual therapy.

The engineer's restraint

There's a temptation in medtech to build the flashy thing - the implant, the sensor, the device that stays in the body announcing its own importance. Engelman went the other direction. His career reads as a long argument for doing less to the body, more precisely. Quiet the signal that won't quiet itself. Shift the volume that's pooled in the wrong place. Then get out.

It's a philosophy that also happens to be good medicine and good business: less hardware, fewer complications, a procedure a patient can walk away from. The unsexy problems - blood volume, splanchnic nerves, the plumbing that decides whether someone can walk to the mailbox - tend to hide the biggest markets and the biggest changes in a life. Engelman has spent two decades betting that the crowd is looking at the wrong organ. Axon Therapies is where he finds out if he's right.

Nine companies in, the pattern is clear. He doesn't invent one product. He invents a way of finding the next problem worth solving - and this time, he's the one who has to see it all the way through.