William Leonard
Atlanta Startup Piezo Therapeutics is building the next-gen platform to transform the delivery of nucleic medicines including vaccines and gene therapies. Piezo founder and Georgia Tech alum, Gaurav Byagathvalli join me on the podcast today to break down the innovative technology powering Piezo’s platform. We’ll also dive into how he stumbled into biotech after working in banking and product management. We’ll talk about the cold email he wrote, which led to his $2 million seed round, and his thoughts on the growing biotech in life sciences startup scene here in Atlanta. Before we begin today’s episode, I’ve got a few events that I’d love to highlight for you all. Happening this Thursday, March 30th at 4:30 pm is the women’s victory celebration. Hosted by Valor founding and Managing Partner, Lisa Calhoun, this is an event celebrating leading women in the startup and venture ecosystem right here in Atlanta. To find out more details, visit valor.vc and you can click on the events tab to register. Also coming up in a few weeks on May 4th is the next showcase of Startup Runway. We’re actively reviewing and accepting applications. So, if you are a pre-seed founder, who is an underrepresented building in the southeast, we’d love to see your application, visit startuprunway.org to apply. And now we’re ready for today’s episode. Gaurav, it’s nice to have you on today, man.
Gaurav Byagathvalli
Thanks. It’s a pleasure to be here.
William Leonard
I want to kick it off by saying congrats on your recent round of fundraising. I think we’re going to really dive into more about that later in the conversation. But kudos to you for raising your seed round in 2022, one of the more difficult years for financing early-stage startups.
Gaurav Byagathvalli
I really appreciate that. It definitely was an interesting year. And I mean, look, these past few years have been amazing growth in the biotech community but I think 2022, really gave us a lot of lessons and taught us a lot about what it’s like to be an early-stage company in the space. And also what it takes to convince people that what you’re working on can really impact, let’s say billions, which is what a lot of VCs say. Excited to share a little bit more about that.
William Leonard
Well, let’s dive into your background. I know you’re a Georgia Tech alum. I’m excited to hear some more about your experiences at Georgia Tech but tell us the story of from youth to college to now.
Gaurav Byagathvalli
I’ve done a little bit of everything. I think something funny that people always say is I’m very confused because I’ve tried so many different things, but I think that’s really what has contributed to how I’ve gotten here. I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. I spent most of my life here. A fun fact I actually like to say is that before high school, I never went to the same school for over two years. So it’s just forced me to go around and try and meet new people and make new friends. And then my family actually moved us all to India. I spent a few years there and then we moved back. It was that contrast between looking at what the healthcare system is like in India, where there really is no system versus the United States, which despite its flaws, it’s still a very structured system. That’s what really got me into the space and thinking well, what can I do and how can I contribute? I started off on the cliche path of you know, want to be a doctor, I want to help people, the same story that everybody says, but then I just stumbled into biotechnology and synthetic biology is the field that I originally came up with. This was really pioneered out of MIT and it’s grown immensely in the past 20 years. I mean, Gingko Bioworks is probably the most well-known company in the space and design region prior to their acquisition. That’s where I started. I started working on diagnostics, primarily due to the cholera outbreak that was out in Yemen. I then switched gears a little bit. I was actually at the University of Georgia for a little while working on vaccines. This was really the introduction to a completely new space for me. I started to realize really well, how can I have an impact? What can we do to make things better? This was back in 2017 and 2018. The vaccines I was working on were using a virus as a delivery mechanism. And I thought, God, this takes too long,l if we’re in a pandemic, this is definitely not going to work. Clearly, in the past few years, we saw that happen.
William Leonard
Did you predict that we were going to have a pandemic in 2017/2018?
Gaurav Byagathvalli
I wouldn’t say I would have predicted it, but I will say that Moderna caught my eye then and I thought, well, a rapid development platform that can respond to vaccines fast is what we’ll need in case that happens. I think the lesson from COVID Is that we’ve had a pandemic now, it’s going to happen again. We don’t know when. At the very least, epidemics and endemics will occur, and they continually occur all over the world. Having really a vast platform to respond to that is going to be key and that’s what mRNA has shown. But despite that, there still are some drawbacks and flaws with the platform, which really need to be addressed and help translate globally. So not just to the US and Europe, which is where we’ve seen it these past few years. Our goal is to try and get it out all over the world. My research actually at Georgia Tech crossed into a unique space we call fertile science. It’s this idea of trying to replace essentially commercial hardware with something extremely inexpensive but using something completely out of the ordinary. So to give you an example, my professor Saad Bhamla, he came up with a 23 cents centrifuge using this toy called a whirligig. So imagine just like a button with holes that’s on a piece of string, you roll it up, and you pull. This thing has been around for thousands of years. He figured out that that thing can do the exact same, essentially the functionality of a benchtop centrifuge. And so I started working in there and that’s where we came up with our technology, which is, we found out that the electric pulses that a barbecue lighter produces can actually be used to get DNA and RNA into cells. We showed that originally with bacteria and now in a more recent collaboration with Mark Kraus that’s at Georgia Tech. We showed that if you combine that with these really tiny needles, you’re actually able to deliver vaccines in the skin, the same technology that’s in the barbecue lighter.
William Leonard
Wow. Who would have thought that? You had this discovery while you were doing research working with vaccines? At what point did you say, hey, this is a tremendous opportunity. Let me first complete some more research and then turn this into a business. What was that moment for you?
Gaurav Byagathvalli
It’s definitely interesting, because originally, when we were brainstorming, what can we do with this, like one of the first things that came out was, well, we could start a nonprofit to try to get it to people. We actually spoke to a lot of people across pharma all the way from really large pharmaceutical companies down to small biotechs, and that’s when we realized that there really is a market for this. More importantly, there’s a problem in the space that COVID has somewhat addressed, but not really, and there’s a lot of opportunity to grow. That’s when it really hit us that we have actually developed a platform that can work across a wide range of therapeutics and even diseases, I mean, not just COVID or flu, but thinking about diseases where there are no vaccines that have been made, even into oncology. I think that the real pitch for a lot of companies these days is having a broad reactive platform that can hit a lot of different areas. And also, it ultimately saves a lot of people’s lives.
William Leonard
That’s so cool. Tell us more about the platform, how it works, and sort of where you are today as a startup.
Gaurav Byagathvalli
This work was going on at Georgia Tech, and tied to my earlier point about doing a bunch of different things, I worked as a software engineer, I worked as a business analyst, and I also worked as an investment banker. Even my degree is actually in Systems Engineering, not biotech. The constant threat I’ve had these past seven years basically has been in biotech doing research. We fleshed out the platform and we published a paper in 2021 on the technology, showing that it works really well with the DNA vaccines in small animals. And since then, we did basically two things, we spoke to a lot of pharma companies and did a lot of customer discovery, to really try to nail down well, is this even a problem? I think this is actually one of the big challenges for engineers and scientists, we’d love to talk about our technology and we just think it’s going to solve a problem, but we never actually test to see if that problem exists. That was the first thing we did. Is there actually a problem with the way vaccines are currently delivered and what opportunity is there to try and improve that? And once we really hone down on that, then we try to find essentially investors who meet the same essential needs and essentially agree with the thesis that we’re coming up with and also want to have an impact in the field. Because it’s one thing to get an investment from a firm, but it’s another to find a partner who really shares and agrees with what you’re doing and wants to work with you to achieve that dream and make it a reality. I think that’s where we really found, after speaking to a lot of people, Open Philanthropy really shares that initiative, and wants to help contribute to a better humanity. Hopefully, that’s what we’ll do.
William Leonard
You mentioned you all, brainstorm, did some more research, and then you started to go to customer discovery. That is an early mountain that a lot of founders must tackle in order to one, informed how they’re going to build a product. Two, get to market and in some sort of fashion. What was early customer discovery like for you and your team?
Gaurav Byagathvalli
The first thing I’ll say it’s pretty nerve-wracking. We spoke to executives at some of the largest pharma companies in the world. To just see that come through your email and even get on a call with them, it’s hard but you eventually get used to that as you do it over time. But I really do think like customer discovery is an art just like science can also be an art that it takes a lot of practice to really get. I think one thing you have to come to understand is that sometimes you will be wrong and that’s okay. And that’s what you want to do. It’s better to fail and fail fast than to drag it along for a really, really long time and realize, like 10 years down the line, oops, I was wrong in what I was saying. That was one of the early lessons really test those hypotheses not even mentioning a word about what we’re working on, to really understand and get the true honest opinion from these scientists, these CEOs, on what problems they’re actually facing, and then introduce maybe what we’re working on to see well, does this really meet that challenge?
William Leonard
It sounds like it’s a series of really open-ended questions and not product-related questions. I feel like that’s great advice to offer to other founders because you don’t want to steer or sway the prospective customer or the person you’re seeking feedback from in one particular direction rather, let them guide you.
Gaurav Byagathvalli
Exactly. Essentially, make other people realize that they actually do have a problem before trying to even convince them that what you’re doing will address that. Because if people don’t think there’s a problem in the first place, it’s going to be very hard to pitch that what you’re doing is going to improve anything for them. Really coming to the realization that there is this issue with vaccine delivery and there is this opportunity to address that. These are the key parameters that you need to really show with your platform to even have anyone consider using it.
William Leonard
We talked about Open Philanthropy and how they just lead your seed round. Tell us more about what it was like fundraising in 2022 as one of the most volatile years, especially after 2021, when we saw severely inflated valuations. Now, things were really coming back down in terms of, I’d say, round-size valuation and longer diligence cycles. So tell us a little bit more about how you navigated 2022 in terms of fundraising and what were some tips and tricks that ultimately led you to fundraise in that type of environment successfully?
Gaurav Byagathvalli
2022 was a brutal year for anyone to be fundraising, especially in biotech. I mean, the charts will show that the numbers dropped a little bit, but the reality of going through fundraising is that it’s essentially an entire community being cut off from being able to raise these funds. What we noticed when we were fundraising is that a lot of VCs focus mostly on clinical stage assets, companies that are later in their development cycle already have programs that have gone into clinical trials, and so the horizon to really see value out of your investment is much shorter, whereas companies that are much earlier stage, still doing proof of concept development, we’re not really the target for a lot of the funds. That was a challenge for us because we do have a lot of data on animals, but we’re not in clinical trials, yet. We’re still earlier stage. And so at that point, it’s really convincing them that the problem you’re tackling is big enough to warrant the fact that an early-stage investment really makes essentially a strong case. I think we saw countless stories last year of companies still raising big checks, but at lower valuations and having to take a discount on what they originally raised just to keep the candles burning and keep the company running. And that essentially, demotivates a lot of the team that you’re working with, because they see that, well, you’re doing this and giving up as much ownership, what does it look like for us? What is the horizon that we’re gonna see? And I mean, for us, it definitely was a tough year. I think fundraising also is very much a numbers game in that you need to reach out to a lot of people and speak with a lot of people. And in doing so get a lot of feedback on what they see as maybe problems in your thesis, where you could be improving, or who might actually be a better investment, as through a lot of those discussions we finally landed at Open Philanthropy and they really agreed with what we’re working on.
William Leonard
I wanted to dig into that point a bit more. You talk about fundraising being truly a numbers game, did you initially reach out to Open Philanthropy or did they reach out to you?,
Gaurav Byagathvalli
We reached out to them a little later on. I had reached out to a bunch of VCs, some of the biggest names in the space, and even some smaller and emerging ones. There was a prior connection in Open Philanthropy due to some of the work that they function and that they essentially fund at Georgia Tech. But we reached out to them to see if they’d be interested in this and then that just led to a series of discussions and a lot of diligence. That’s what’s gotten us to where we are now.
William Leonard
I wanted to ask, how do you reach out to an investor as a founder that is currently fundraising, do you think that this investor may be aligned with where your business is? I would love to just get some insight from you on how you practically reach out to an investor. Do you try and go through a warm channel or a cold channel? We hear a lot about warm intros. Investors want warm intros. I feel like the warm intro is just such a bias and a barrier for a lot of early-stage founders who just don’t have access to those networks. I love to better understand, from your perspective, what are some ways you can reach out to an investor to get their interest potentially in your business?
Gaurav Byagathvalli
I totally agree with that. I think what people really underestimate is the power of a cold email. I got one of my prior jobs just through a col email and speaking with the firm. I think people really underestimate that including potential customers and potential partners, just tracking down someone’s email and shooting them an email to see if they’re interested and wording that in a good way, really goes a long way to actually landing anything from a partnership to an investment. We took a combination of both approaches. We definitely had people in our network we reached out to who know these investment funds to see if they’d be interested. But actually, most of my investor outreach was via cold email. I just truly essentially looked at investment funds, looked at people who were investing in the space, what their background was what really what the thesis that they’re looking for is, and I just tried to get their email. Sometimes, it went through, sometimes it didn’t. You just had to spend a lot of time trying to figure it out. But we reached out to a lot of people and then Open Philanthropy basically ended up the same. I wouldn’t say Open Philanthropy’s a totally cold email because they were familiar with Georgia Tech, but a lot of people we spoke to and a lot of funds that we reached out to, a lot of them were just through cold contacts.
William Leonard
I love cold emails, man. That’s how I landed a couple of my first early internships and jobs, through just direct outreach on LinkedIn, or, as you said, being scrappy and finding someone’s email. There are just so many tools out there now that are, let’s say, a Google Chrome extension or something like that, where you can pay 10 bucks a month and do 1000 email searches and increase your chances of success and a response rate. Definitely, if you’re a founder out there, leverage the power of cold emailing, Gaurav and the team are a testament to that. As we transition to the conversation here a bit, you are an early-stage biotech life sciences company in Atlanta. Tell us more about why you’re choosing to build here when we think about cities like Boston and others that are really hubs for Life Sciences, what are some of the advantages that you’re seeing at building here in Atlanta?
Gaurav Byagathvalli
I think for a really long time, Atlanta has had some of the key resources that you need to build a biotech company, but a lot of investors have pulled a lot of money, much of these companies out to Boston and California. But now what we’re seeing with really the talent out of Georgia Tech, Emory, Georgia State, UGA, Morehouse, I mean, there’s so many universities here putting out brilliant scientists, and yet a lot of them leave to go to other places because those opportunities don’t exist. That’s because companies are just choosing to get their investment move out. We really want to try and help contribute to building the life sciences community out in Atlanta and that’s one of the main reasons we decided to stay here is because this technology came out of Georgia Tech development, in fact, a collaboration between working on Georgia Tech and working on at Emory. This was an Atlanta-developed technology. We want to see this company also grow the exact same way in Atlanta, hire people from the local community, and build it out to make Atlanta essentially the next life sciences hub in the United States.
William Leonard
I love the vision, man. Georgia Tech is such a fascinating and exciting output here for the city of Atlanta and really the south. There’s no shortage of entrepreneurship, ambition, and interest at Georgia Tech. You probably have a lot of scientists there who are studying biotech vaccines, whatever it may be, who come across fascinating research, and game-changing insights, but oftentimes may struggle to turn that insight into a company opportunity. I would love for you to sort of speak to the bridge that exists there between maybe a scientist who has some fascinating research, interesting discovery, and then commercializing that productizing.
Gaurav Byagathvalli
There’s definitely a long road to go there. I think especially in deep tech, the hardest thing is really the science and coming up with the innovation in the first place. I really think that business can be learned over time, just through experience, and, frankly, cold emailing people and just getting into great conversations. I think that’s a great way to get a lot of advice from experts in the space. And to give you an example, Georgia Tech has the Venture Lab program for people who are looking to translate technologies developed in university labs out to the market. We’ve seen a lot of success with that. One, for example, is Guide Therapeutics, which was recently acquired by Beam, was a technology developed at Georgia Tech. There are a couple of other spinouts along with ours, all from the university. And essentially, having Venture Lab present allows mentorship opportunities and growth for scientists and founders, who are trying to understand how to navigate the customer discovery process, how to go about fundraising, how to go about building a really strong and diverse team to really lead that early stage company because the team is really what makes or breaks when you’re looking at your first few employees, and you’re looking at that rapid growth cycle. Having essential incubator programs like that at universities has a lot of value. You can directly correlate that with the success of a lot of spinouts.
William Leonard
Shout out to Georgia Tech and all the innovation that is being fostered right there in the heart of Atlanta. As we wrap up the conversation now, we’ve talked a lot about Atlanta in you being here and wanting to grow the company here in Piezo. What are some of the resources that you’re leveraging now? Maybe some of the things that you’d like to be leveraging as a result of the city’s sort of burgeoning growth that we’re experiencing now.
Gaurav Byagathvalli
I think this just was one of the earlier points I said on, really what makes a startup community very successful and allows them to grow. I think it’s three different factors coalescing, it’s having really strong talent, really strong infrastructure, and really strong capital, all within close proximity. I think that’s the equation that’s made Boston and Silicon Valley worked really well. I think Atlanta has that now. So Science Square is one of the developments that are coming up, adding a bunch of lab space, retail, and even residences all in the same building. You could be working, shopping, and living all in the same building and in the same complex with a community of other people doing the same thing. There’s Tower Square, I believe, that’s also being developed in Midtown. Now Portal Innovations has come to Atlanta and is actually hosting a lot of events to bring out the life sciences community. We’ve had the talent here for a really long time and now I think we’re convincing them to stay because we’re seeing infrastructure being built and also capital now coming into the city. I think really, for a lot of companies, including ours over time, really making use of those resources, which are all now going to be localized within the city is going to be key to growth.
William Leonard
100%. I think localizing capital is a tremendous opportunity that has existed here for some time. Now, you look at firms like Valor and other firms that are seed, lead funders here in the south, I think it’s just so important to have a locality of the capital where you don’t have to fly across the country to meet with your investor, you can go sit down in Midtown at Intermezzo, and have coffee, right? It’s so nice to do that. I totally understand the vision and really excited about what you all are doing at Piezo. I would love to understand what’s on the horizon for you all in 2023 as a company?
Gaurav Byagathvalli
I think the cool thing about Piezo is that despite therapeutics being in our name, all we’re actually developing is a delivery platform and a device to work across a broad range of therapeutics. What that really means is that, whether it’s DNA, whether it’s RNA, whether it’s infectious diseases, or whether it’s cancer, we like working with companies all across different spaces, across a diverse set of areas. It really allows us to achieve that mission and really leverage the power of a platform. Our goal is to hopefully work with a bunch of these companies as we go in through the end of this year and into next year and also help flesh out new versions of our technology that will actually make it through regulatory approval, because one of the biggest things, obviously for biotech companies is long horizons to get to market and to go through clinical trials and see all that validation. But I think we’re definitely on the right trajectory. We’re seeing a lot of growth and we’re looking for talent as we grow. I think as all these come together, we have very strong and promising sites on the near horizon.
William Leonard
You’ve got some new capital in your back pocket to build, grow, and scale eventually. I’m excited and looking forward to seeing how you lead Piezo to become hopefully the next billion-dollar Atlanta biotech story.
Gaurav Byagathvalli
I mean, that’s the dream, right? The next unicorn, that’s what everyone says. But I mean, hopefully, we can. And at the end of the day, everything we do is about patients and it’s about improving lives. That’s why we feel really at home with our investor because our mission is global health, which is to really help people and bring access to these medicines across the world, not just to the United States and Europe. We want to do that across a broad range of therapeutics, not just vaccines, right? Hopefully, with however long it takes, we’ll get there and I think we will with the team and the technology that we have.
William Leonard
I love it. Well, Gaurav, thank you so much today for your time. I’m looking forward to seeing how you all continue to blossom.
Gaurav Byagathvalli
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
William Leonard
Cheers.
Lisa Calhoun
We’re thrilled to have you as an Atlanta Startup Podcast listener to help you get the most out of the experience. Let me invite you to three insider opportunities from our host Valor Ventures. First, want to be a guest on this amazing show. Reach out to our booking team at atlantastartuppodcast.com. Click on booking, It’s a no-brainer from there. Are you raising a seed round? Valor definitely wants to hear from you. Share your startup story at valor.vc/pitch. Are you a woman or minority-led startup valor sister program? The Startup Runway Foundation gives away grants to promising startups led by underrepresented founders. The mission of the Startup Runway Foundation is connecting underrepresented founders to their first investors. Startup runway finalists have raised over $40 million. See if you qualify for one of these amazing grants at startuprunway.org. You can also sign up for our next showcase for free there. Let me let you go today with a shout-out to Startup Runway presenting sponsor Cox Enterprises and to our founding partners, American Family Institute, Truist, Georgia Power, Avanta Ventures, and Innovators Legal. These great organizations make Startup Runway possible. Thanks for listening today and see you back next week.
