A veteran biopharma executive tries to fund his own product — and sees firsthand how hard it is
After two decades as an executive at well-known drug companies, he’s used to navigating the ups and downs of raising money on the public market.
But Greg Mayes has never faced a fundraising challenge like this before.
Galvanized by his teenage son’s epilepsy diagnosis, Mayes started a new company to try to shepherd a promising inhaler technology for epilepsy through a key clinical trial. Now, he’s racing against the clock to convince venture capital firms and private investors to help him move forward. He needs a total of $21 million by the end of this month — and he still has a third of the way to go.
Mayes’s quest has sent him crisscrossing the country over the past year for meetings with investors and scientists. He’s spent countless hours working the phone and making his pitch over Skype. He put up a six-figure sum of his own money to front his startup, Engage Therapeutics, and he plans to invest another six-figure sum. And it’s not at all clear if that will be enough.
Raising this Series A round, he said, “is harder than I expected.”
Mayes is billing his treatment as a would-be EpiPen for epilepsy, a way
