The award came with $1,000 worth of laboratory products. Zvonimir Vrselja sent them to Osijek. By then, he was working at Yale, and the recognition belonged to his research there. The destination belonged to an earlier part of his life: Professor Marija Heffer’s laboratory, where he had been given an opportunity to begin.
There are grander figures in the career of Bexorg’s co-founder and CEO. His company announced $42.5 million in cumulative funding in October 2025. There are journal publications, a transatlantic move and an expanding leadership team. Yet the equipment award is a useful place to start. It has a sender, a recipient and a reason. A biography can get surprisingly far on those three things.
Vrselja had become a finalist for the 2019 Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology. The products were part of that recognition. By donating them to Heffer’s lab, he gave his own early research connection a practical continuation. Gratitude, on this occasion, could be unpacked and used.
Before Connecticut, a classroom in Osijek
Vrselja was born in Osijek on January 21, 1987. He attended the city’s III. gimnazija, a secondary school with a science and mathematics focus, then entered university in 2005. His M.D. followed in 2011, his doctorate in 2015, both from Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek.
The years contain work that a brief executive biography tends to flatten. He finished his first degree with excellent results, received a Rector’s Award and began working as an assistant in the university’s anatomy and neuroscience department in September 2011. Doctoral study ran alongside that job. The student was becoming someone with responsibilities inside the institution that had taught him.
Heffer’s invitation mattered during those student years. Vrselja later credited her with opening her laboratory to him and giving him his first opportunity to do science. For a young researcher, access is a concrete thing: a place where a question can become work, and where an experienced person is willing to let that work begin.
An introduction, then an ocean
In late 2015, a colleague in Croatia suggested that Vrselja and Nenad Sestan speak. Sestan was at Yale. He needed a particular combination of experience for a difficult research project, and Vrselja’s background caught his attention. “Exactly what I wanted,” Sestan later said of the match.
Within months, Vrselja moved to New Haven. He arrived in the United States in 2016 to begin the Yale chapter of his research career. The eventual company was still years away. The immediate opportunity was to join a laboratory and work with people whose skills could be put together around a shared problem.
Stefano Daniele became another central collaborator. The early work involved repeated attempts and unfamiliar practical questions. Vrselja described it as “Lots of trial and error.” That phrase has the virtue of sounding like work. It leaves room for unsuccessful attempts, revised methods and the possibility that an intelligent idea will still demand a great deal of adjustment.
The later CEO title can make this period look inevitable. At the time, the documented sequence was more ordinary: somebody recommended a conversation; the skills matched; a researcher moved. The founding date would come later.
A paper with more than one protagonist
In April 2019, the Yale team’s work appeared in Nature. Vrselja and Daniele shared equal first-author credit. Sestan was among the authors, alongside collaborators spanning several institutions and disciplines. The author list is a useful corrective to the solitary-genius portrait: the work carried many names because many people had contributed.
For Vrselja, the publication became a defining professional milestone. It connected his early training to a visible result from the Yale years. The Eppendorf & Science finalist recognition followed that year. His work also reached Science through an essay accompanying the award.
Recognition introduces a new audience. People who have never visited a laboratory begin to encounter its researchers through an article, a photograph or an award announcement. A complicated working life acquires a few public markers. In Vrselja’s case, those markers make the route legible: Osijek, Yale, publication, finalist.
The equipment donation adds another arrow to that route. Something earned through the Yale work went back to the institution where he had started. The exchange was small enough to be specific, which is why it remains memorable.
“Lots of trial and error.”
Zvonimir Vrselja on the early research process
The connections keep travelling
Vrselja’s move abroad did not remove Osijek from his personal life. In a 2019 interview, he described finding time for his wife Lucija, reading and playing video games with friends in his hometown. He also spoke of returning to Osijek, where his mother and sister lived. A research career could cross the Atlantic while an evening’s company remained pleasantly familiar.
There was a professional connection going in the other direction, too. David Andrijevic, another researcher from Osijek, arrived at Yale in November 2018. When describing that move, he singled out both Heffer and Vrselja for their help. The former student had become part of someone else’s route into the laboratory.
That is a different measure of a career from an appointment or a publication. It asks what becomes possible for another person. Here, there is a named colleague, a destination and an acknowledgment. The connections between Osijek and New Haven were being used again.
His name has also appeared on a lecture back in Osijek: Brainwaves to Bytes: Engineering the Digital Brain. It is a compact description of the territory his career now crosses. The event placed him among speakers discussing companies, technology and practical questions about building things. A university city that supplied his early education could also become an audience for the work that followed.
A different set of responsibilities
Vrselja and Sestan founded Bexorg at Yale in 2021. Vrselja became CEO. The change brought a different organizational problem around the research: how to build a company that could support the work, recruit people and establish relationships beyond the original laboratory.
The business grew around several kinds of expertise. By July 2026, Bexorg had announced Bruce Car as chief scientific officer and Michael Fenn as chief business officer. Sean Murphy had been appointed chief technology officer the previous November. The titles describe distinct jobs inside an organization that now had to coordinate science, technology and business development.
Vrselja’s public recruiting posts offer a less ceremonial view of that transition. In one, he pointed prospective robotics leaders toward Murphy and the team in New Haven. The post mentioned robotics infrastructure, with tags including ROS2, AWS and Kuka. The vocabulary belongs to people who need systems to operate, rather than merely appear in a presentation.
For a scientist becoming an executive, hiring changes the shape of the work. The question of who can build and maintain a system sits beside the question of what the system should do. Bexorg’s appointments make that widening responsibility visible.
Engine Ventures led the round. Participants included Amplify Partners, Starbloom Capital, Connecticut Innovations and E1 Ventures.
Even a routine corporate photograph carries a trace of that growth. Photographer Seshu Badrinath described Vrselja coming to him for portraits in 2025. That session led to a conversation about photographing the rest of Bexorg, followed by team headshot days in New Haven. It is a modest business anecdote, but an apt one: the individual portrait became a job involving the wider company. More faces needed to fit into the picture.
The work plan ahead
The company’s October 2025 financing brought Ann DeWitt of Engine Ventures and David Beyer of Amplify Partners onto its board. Funding had an organizational consequence as well as a financial one: new people joined the group responsible for company decisions. The familiar founder partnership was now surrounded by a wider circle of expertise and accountability.
A year later, another announcement gave Vrselja a second title beside CEO. ARPA-H listed him as principal investigator for Bexorg’s ExOBrain project, with an award start date of September 4, 2026. On October 7, the company announced funding of up to $28.3 million for a three-phase, 36-month program.
The project’s stated engineering work includes hardware and software upgrades and AI-driven control. Those are objectives for the coming work, with a schedule attached. They show how directly Vrselja remains connected to the research program while leading the company around it.
There is a useful discipline in reading the announcement as a work plan. The funding is an award of up to a stated amount. The program has phases. Its ambitions belong to the future. A founder’s next chapter comes with tasks still to complete.
A return address
Another small detail in Vrselja’s public story arrives from a movie. He grew up watching Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, and later wrote about the unexpected experience of having his professional work connect with Fox’s foundation. Childhood familiarity had acquired an adult, working relationship.
The coincidence has a little of the pleasure of recognizing an old face in an unfamiliar room. It also places the scientist back inside an ordinary life: school, films, friends, a hometown. Executive biographies often hurry past those details on their way to the latest title.
Vrselja’s route rewards a slower reading. Heffer’s lab offered an opening. A colleague’s introduction helped him reach Yale. He and Sestan became co-founders. Other researchers and executives joined the picture. Through those changes, Osijek kept appearing in the story.
And when the prize products needed a destination, he had a return address.