The Pragmatic Moonshot: Why I Sold My Car for One More Month of Runway
Surviving the hardest days of building a biotech startup requires relentless resilience, early revenue, and one well-timed car sale.
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“The ship is going down. Save yourself.”
That is what I told our intern back in 2019. I was a solo founder bootstrapping a deep tech biotech company, and I was nearly out of cash.
Devin Thorpe often asks changemakers on this platform to name their superpower. If I had to distill mine, it is relentless resilience. When you are building something difficult, you inevitably hit a wall where you have to decide how committed you really are.
For me, that moment arrived when I looked at my car.
My Mazda RX-8 was worth about one more month of runway.
After finding a buyer, I took the scenic route toward the drop-off, weighing the risk and mapping out the next 30 days. Before stepping out of the driver’s seat, I remember the internal monologue vividly: Am I really going to sell my car? Well, what is the alternative? I either buy myself thirty more days to figure it out, or I fold today, walk away, and watch the entire vision die right here. Screw that.
I stepped out of the car. “One condition,” I told the buyer. “I’ll need a ride to my lab.”
At the time, Frontier Bio was still very early, but I was already proving that the technology had practical potential.
The bootstrapper’s advantage
Building living human tissue is incredibly capital intensive. Because I was bootstrapping, I did not have the luxury of spending a decade in a lab burning cash before making a dime. I had to find immediate applications for the technology.
I started generating early revenue by working with researchers at the Mayo Clinic. They were exploring alternatives to using live animals for testing medical devices like flow diverters, stents, and aneurysm coils.
I created scaffolds that they combined with human cells to grow into preliminary tissue-engineered blood vessels, which could then be used to test these devices.
It was a crucial stepping stone.
Working with them showed that this technology could play a role in reducing the industry’s reliance on animal testing. But early pilot revenue is rarely enough to keep a deep tech lab running forever, which is exactly why the Mazda had to go.
Selling the car bought Frontier Bio about one month of life. With the clock ticking down, I was officially accepted into Brinc, a deep tech accelerator. They saw the early commercial traction I had generated in a highly complex field. Before my thirty days of car money ran out, being accepted into the program unlocked a $100,000 lifeline.
Unlocking massive leaps forward
That single month of bought time eventually snowballed. Since those early days, we have generated $5.5 million in sales and raised $4.1 million. We secured a National Science Foundation SBIR grant to expand our vascular work. In 2025, the core patent for my method of creating advanced vascular grafts was officially granted in the US.
Given my background in developing technologies like brain-machine interfaces and microfluidic DNA assembly, people sometimes ask me why I chose to go all-in on this specific problem. The truth is, I am driven to build foundational technologies that push the absolute boundaries of what is medically possible.
Tissue engineering does exactly that. First, it unlocks the ability to reduce our reliance on animal studies in medical research. Next, it unlocks the creation of implantable tissue-engineered blood vessels. And looking toward the future, it unlocks the foundational technology to help solve the global human organ shortage.
As our technology and capabilities scale, our funding strategy has evolved as well. We recently decided to open a community round on Wefunder.
Bypassing the venture bottleneck
Committing to the traditional venture route today often means sacrificing over a year to investor roadshows and exhausting diligence. We cannot afford to have our leadership sidelined for 12 months. Regulation Crowdfunding empowers us to control our capital pipeline directly, keeping our executive focus exactly where it belongs: on growing the business and executing our core mission.
We also have a deep network of entrepreneurs and operators who want to invest small checks. Wefunder’s platform allows us to easily bring these individuals on board, letting us tap into their brainpower without the administrative headache.
We are turning our community into a growth engine.
Historically, our private angel investors have been instrumental in making introductions that lead directly to actual revenue. Opening a community round allows us to systematically scale that effect, bringing on hundreds of industry professionals and advocates who can act as champions for our tissue models worldwide.
We are no longer just trying to survive the next thirty days. We are building a reality where medical breakthroughs do not rely on animal testing, and where the waitlist for a lifesaving organ is a thing of the past. The future of medicine is living, engineered, and human. We invite you to help us build it.
About the Author
Eric Bennett is the founder and CEO of Frontier Bio, a tissue engineering company developing lab-grown human tissues for research today and regenerative medicine in the long term. A serial entrepreneur and biomedical engineer, he previously served as CTO at Aether, building advanced, low-cost bioprinters. His technical background spans bioprinting, microfluidics, DNA assembly, optogenetics, and brain-computer interfacing. With a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering, Eric is driven by a passion to turn science fiction into reality, committed to developing transformative technologies that push the boundaries of regenerative medicine.
Crowdfunding campaign: wefunder.com/frontier.bio
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ericbennettsprofile/
Website: frontierbio.com
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