In Salt Lake City, biotech founders new and seasoned reflect on ways to ride out the industry’s challenges, such as sending cold emails to investors and learning to address leadership weaknesses.
Oh, to be a biotech founder in the heyday of 2019 to 2021, when finding capital was easy and public admiration of the industry buoyed the sector. Nowadays, company founders are facing a risk-averse investor base that prefers the hype of AI to medicines that crawl toward the market at a snail’s pace.
That’s what BioSpace heard in Salt Lake City from a group of biotech founders—both brandnew and 20 years in.
“There were the glory days of 2019, 2020 and maybe into 2021, where biotech was solving all of the world’s problems,” Denali Therapeutics CEO Ryan Watts remembers.
While recent signs have pointed towards recovery, the industry has been enduring a prolonged down period. Yet science has continued in the background. Founders just need to work even harder to get noticed and earn a slice of the limited capital that is out there.
“You’re really fighting the whole environment,” said Evita Weagel, CEO and cofounder of small molecule oncology company Eris Biotech. Weagel is a resident at Altitude Lab, the Salt Lake City biotech accelerator that is showing the next generation of biotech founders the ropes.
Watts agrees with Weagel’s sentiment. “Biotech is particularly susceptible to high interest rates,” he said. “I’m not an economist, but I am a CEO who runs a company and you have to be aware of these things.”
The interest rate situation has made capital hard to come by. Capital has shifted toward exits—meaning late-stage companies ready to IPO or about to sell—rather than new deployments, according to a recent report from PitchBook. Exits are great for the industry, as investors hopefully recycle that money back into new companies.
But Salt Lake City’s biotech founders say they are facing a steep challenge right now. There are fewer small checks being handed out, Weagel said.
Carmen Kivisild, who founded Elnora, an AI agent for lab protocols, said that investors are taking less risk and chasing hype—meaning AI. Even though her company straddles both the biotech and tech worlds, still she says the environment has been difficult.
Government funding, once the lifeline of early-stage life sciences companies, has also dried up among shifting policy from the Trump administration’s health agencies.
Wooing investors can be tough in a business where the biology cannot be rushed. “Cells are going to divide when they divide,” Weagel said.
But Weagel is finding success raising capital from perhaps some unexpected sources. She recently received a check for Eris from a baseball team owner, who has also offered her other support like travel accommodations.
“They want to use their money to really help humanity,” she said of such investors.
Kivisild received one of her first $100,000 checks from a cold email. She also got into Altitude Lab the same way. It’s a bold approach that has paid off, as she was able to take her startup from humble beginnings in Estonia to Utah’s thriving biotech hub.
In these times, founders like Weagel and Kivisild are leaning on their community. Altitude Lab is providing space for these founders to build their companies and access to investors via meet-and-greets and pitching events.
“We have this mentality that if one of us wins, all of us win,” Weagel said.
From 0 to 10
One investor attending an Altitude Lab event in Salt Lake City last month, Ben Lopez, said the focus at this early stage is on the person at the head of the company.
“You’ve got to focus on the entrepreneur,” he said. And that means ensuring the right person is in charge with the skills to lead, from the initial days in the lab to future board meetings. “Founders are good at 0-1. They might not be best at 1-10.”
When trying to speak to investors though, CEOs may not want to admit what they don’t know. This is fair, Lopez said, as a venture capitalist may not respond to vulnerability in a pitch. He suggested building a pitch so it includes more than just an ask for money or expertise and skills needed.
“Every job is a sales job. If you don’t know how to sell, you’re going to have a tough time,” he said.
Weagel has certainly had to take off her lab coat and put on her blazer to get into the CEO mindset. “I’m a scientist. I was able to sell an idea,” she said.
Lopez and Weagel also noted that a good way to gain traction with investors, despite the slow pace of biotech, is to have something new to show every time you meet to demonstrate that the process is indeed moving along. You have to “know how to transmit your scientific findings into traction,” Weagel said.
Kivisild has also turned her company into content, developing it in the public eye via a blog that details every step. “Building in public has become a feature,” she said, adding that the blog has attracted venture capital interest.
Watts certainly did not have to contend with social media when he began the march toward forming Denali 20 years ago. The biotech just celebrated its first drug approval in March, for the rare disease therapy Avlayah.
But he has been in the industry through some of its most intense challenges and has seen the cyclical nature of the markets. More recently, he remembers spinning off Denali’s small molecule work into the biotech Tenvie Therapeutics, which made its public debut in January 2025, in an effort to ride out the post-pandemic period.
“Part of that was just, let’s focus. Let’s make sure resources are going after Avlayah’s approval and these other pieces,” Watts said.
To the founders coming behind him, Watts promised that the market will improve—he’s seen it happen. The industry has already in the past six months seen positive news and encouraging signals—he pointed to Revolution Medicines’ practice-changing pancreatic cancer data as an example.
“It is really challenging right now, but it will cycle again,” Watts promised. “But it only cycles if promise is seen.”
