Click here for Part I & Part II

Andy Jones has been a whiff of fresh air, and a bundle of energy, at Maryland Venture Fund since taking its helm as managing director in late 2015. In a little over a year, he is near closing a new fund, is taking the Baltimore-centric fund to other hubs and harnessing the rich IP residing at Johns Hopkins.

“As you know this great state we all live in, there is a lot of deal activity all over the place. So I wanted to make sure when I rebuilt the team that we had people and presence in particularly the important deal geographies,” Jones told citybizlist’s Edwin Warfield in an interview.

Jones earned bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University and a Masters of Business Administration degree with specialization in finance from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He began his career working in the research labs of Motorola and later earned his spurs in venture investing at Grotech and Boulder Ventures. Jones also ran his own firm, High Street, with swift success.

Maryland Venture Fund has over $100 million under its management and has invested in over 150 technology companies in Maryland.

EDWIN WARFIELD: What are the startups you are excited about?

ANDY JONES: Harpoon is a really exciting business run by a fellow named Bill Niland who is an incredible entrepreneur. We really like Bill and the reason is Bill had an interesting company that he was the founder of prior called Vapotherm and we love it. You always hear the phrase serial entrepreneurs, guys that are going at it again just like I did in my career. They tend not to make the same mistakes they made the first time. So they are very seasoned and Bill has done a spectacular job building up Harpoon Medical. The reason it is such a great success story I think for TEDCO and for the Maryland Venture Fund. So this gets back to what I said earlier, the synergies of TEDCO and the Maryland Venture Fund.

Harpoon Medical was started by a fellow named Dr. Gammy at the University of Maryland a few years back and when they needed some seed capital one of the sources they went to was TEDCO and TEDCO made a seed investment in Dr. Gammy’s company and Bill Niland's company to help really get it off the ground, that very early stage of investment.

Fast forward a year or two and they needed some bigger capital. Maryland Venture Fund came in and invested in that business to really help expand the business. So this is a great example of the synergies between TEDCO and Maryland Venture Fund, and why Maryland Venture Fund makes sense to be part of TEDCO.

Fast forward to today, Bill, his team and Dr. Gammy have a very exciting business. In fact, it's so exciting it attracted investment from Edwards Life Science, which is a $20 billion market cap public company. What they do is mitral valve replacement and the unique twist in their product is, you do not have to open up the chest cavity to fix the heart. You can do this thing, go in underneath the rib cage and do it all remotely. So, it's an incredible advance forward for patients, the recovery times are much less and where they are in their business now is they have been successfully doing these surgeries in Europe and assuming that it all goes very well this is a company that an Edwards or a big medical device company could purchase one day. It is a great local success story and not that many people know about it.

GrayBug is another good example. GrayBug was started out of Johns Hopkins and Johns Hopkins has some incredible technology and there is a person there who I have a lot of respect for, Christy Wyskiel, who was hired a few years ago to really unlock a lot of that Hopkins technology.

Hopkins always had a reputation a decade ago, two decades ago, of doing great technology but nobody could access it and Christy and her team at Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures have really started to unlock some great assets that these great researchers produce at Hopkins, these discoveries and GrayBug fits that exact example.

A fellow named Justin Haynes, who is a top leader in eye field, ophthalmology field, came up with this technology for GrayBug. It is a drug technology they are going after and they are going after this market, macular degeneration, which is a huge issue demographically. When you get older if you do not treat this you go blind so, the outcomes are very serious.

The current state-of-the-art to treat this is a shot in the eye. There is a public company called Regeneron that has the market-leading product and if you look at the Regeneron sales each quarter it’s massive. It's approaching a $1 billion a quarter, $4 billion a year and there are a few other solutions on the market and you have to give the shot in the eye every month or every other month.

GrayBug’s technology will be a huge leap forward if it proves successful, where you can do two shots a year. It's hugely effective for the patient, just like Harpoon Medicals is a big step forward.

Maryland Venture Fund is invested and what we are so excited about is we were able to attract a world-class CEO, a fellow named Jeff Cleveland who had taken another biotech company public, most importantly because these drug life science companies are so capital-intensive, much more capital-intensive than a Harpoon Medical, you kind of raise big money and we were able to attract around this deal serious money from Deerfield Management, Claris and OrbiMed, who are three of the top-tier life science drug investors in the country.

We were able, out of this company that came out of the genesis at Johns Hopkins, and through the work of a very solid person down in North Carolina, who is involved in a fund called Hatteras Venture. Her name is Christy Shaffer. She is the chairman of GrayBug and she put some early money in along with Maryland Venture Fund and she really gets credit for bringing this syndicate of world-class investors to this company. They raised a $44.5 million Series B round of capital early spring in 2016, and the company is off to the races.

Those are two great, hopefully local, success stories but they are hitting all their milestones so far and doing very well.

Connect with Andy on LinkedIn

Sponsored by:

Founded in 1993, WMS Partners is the only independent multi-family office in the Baltimore area that isn’t associated with a brokerage firm, bank or trust company. Our team of approximately 50 professionals and 14 owners spanning three generations assists in the direction of our client’s financial goals and objectives and oversees in excess of $3 billion in assets.

As our client’s advocate and central point for their financial affairs, we work pro-actively with service providers, including accountants, attorneys, consultants, insurance professionals and philanthropic advisors. We are large enough that we provide exposure to many unique ideas and strategies in the investment, estate, tax, financial advisory and risk management arena; but small enough to provide discreet, pro-active individualized guidance.

Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

Connect on LinkedIn