No Limits Entrepreneur of the Week: Piraye Beim

Congratulations to our No Limits Entrepreneur of the Week, Piraye Beim!

Name: Piraye Yurttas Beim, Founder/CEO, Celmatix

Home Base: New York, New York

Bio: I’m the founder and CEO of Celmatix, a next-generation women’s health company. I graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, received my PhD in molecular genetics from Cornell University (Weill), and conducted my postdoctoral research in embryology at the University of Cambridge. I met my husband a year after founding Celmatix, and we now have three children between the ages of five and one.

Why did you start your own business? After turning 30 during my postdoctoral work in the UK at the University of Cambridge, I realized two things: First, how many of the women in my network were making life-defining decisions about their fertility and family plans based primarily on their age. Second, that one decade into the era after the first human genome had been sequenced, the transformation that this breakthrough was bringing to oncology was not translating to women’s health. So, I left the UK, moved back to New York City, and teamed up with my graduate school roommate, Laura Towart, to launch Celmatix. Our mission was to leverage big data, including genomics, to help women make better-informed decisions about their health through personalized medicine.

How are you financing your business? We have been backed by Topspin Partners and other venture investors who share our passion for improving the lives of women.

What’s one piece of advice you wish you knew when you started? I wish I had realized earlier on that all start ups are hard, just in different ways. It's easy to compare yourself to others through the lens of valuations and glossy media articles, but after meeting countless entrepreneurs and CEOs over the years I have learned that no start up is easy. When I founded the company, I didn’t have any formal business training, and I had moments of doubt when I questioned my abilities as a leader. The reality is that, when you are doing something that has never been done before, there is no training program that can fully prepare you for the experience, although it turned out that I was actually well-equipped for entrepreneurship thanks to my experience with my PhD, where I spent years problem solving and working through obstacles.