Edwin Stone

Edwin Stone is the chief executive officer of Cellular Origins, a company building robotic, automated manufacturing systems for cell therapies. His focus is the “tools and tech” layer of advanced therapeutics, the enabling hardware that determines whether cell and gene therapies can be made affordably and at scale.

Stone appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Erik Wiklund, CEO of the circular-RNA company Circio Holding, for a conversation on raising capital in a hard biotech funding market. Having closed Cellular Origins’ financing in late 2025, Stone offered a clear-eyed view of how investors are now behaving.

He is best known from the conversation for naming the brutal timing of fundraising: for any given investor, he said, there is roughly a “15-minute window on a certain Tuesday” when a company fits, too early for years, then suddenly too late. He also argued that venture capital, despite preaching diversification, tends to be remarkably undiversified, skewing the market as everyone piles into the same fashionable space.

Stone’s thesis is that enabling technology has been chronically underinvested relative to its impact, and that the biology and the tools have now converged to the point of mutual dependence. Unlike a therapeutic, his business is not a bet on one drug succeeding but on the success of an entire industry, a different and, he argues, more durable risk profile, and one increasingly essential to transferring advanced therapies affordably across geographies.