Princeton Entrepreneurship Council is pleased to announce the winners of the 2022 Tiger Entrepreneur Award. For the last six years, the Tiger Entrepreneur Award has been given to celebrate the value of entrepreneurship across the Princeton community and to emphasize the University’s commitment to Entrepreneurship the Princeton Way. “We are excited to see the impact that these three companies will have on our world – each in a unique and important way. Each of them embodies Princeton’s informal motto ‘in the service of humanity’,” said PEC Executive Director Anne-Marie Maman ’84.
The Tiger Entrepreneur Award will be presented at this year’s Celebrate Princeton Innovation reception on Thursday, October 13. The 2022 winners, in alphabetical order:
Mark Esposito *17
Esposito is co-founder and vice president of Kayothera, a startup developing small molecule immunotherapies to treat solid cancers. Kayothera is a spinout from the lab of Yibin Kang, Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton, with whom Esposito earned his Ph.D. and also was a postdoctoral researcher. Kang and Esposito co-founded Kayothera in 2019 with seed funding from the New Jersey Health Foundation. Earlier this year, Kayothera raised a $8 million Series A round, led by Accelerator Life Science Partners. In addition to his work at Kayothera, he is Director of Biology at Optimeos, another Princeton spinout, as well as Principal at Meagi, LLC, a biotechnology consulting firm.