INNOVATION

From left: Matt Harris, director of product design, GSSI (the 2023 Product of the Year recipient); Julie Demers, executive director, NH Tech Alliance; Lisa King, senior account executive, Cross Insurance, POY Committee chair; and Conor R. Cullinane, co-founder and CEO, Pirouette Medical. (Courtesy of Events United)

Armed with a “terrible” pitch deck and a vision for an innovative epinephrine injector, Conor Cullinane raised $100,000 from two investors and convinced two former classmates to quit their jobs, move to New Hampshire and co-found Pirouette Pharma.

“They both first moved into my parents’ house, who were empty-nesters at the time,” Cullinane says. “We had a few whiteboards up at the house and all that. It was a really cool experience to be able to literally build something in a garage.”

In 2016, as the idea took shape, Cullinane was still enrolled in a doctoral program in Boston. After six months with Cullinane’s parents, Matthew Kane and Elijah Kapas found an apartment nearby and, in 2017, the company was officially founded in the shadow of Cambridge’s life sciences hub.

In the years that followed, the company cultivated its investors and grew. As it outgrew its Massachusetts space, Pirouette made its way back to New Hampshire. It now operates in a 10,000-square-foot facility with an ISO Class 8 clean room in Portsmouth, where it manufactures its auto-injector platform, which was named the NH Tech Alliance’s Product of the Year in 2024. That device is in the pre-FDA-approved stage for treatments of epinephrine for allergic reactions and naloxone to reverse opioid overdoses.

Pirouette’s startup journey echoes that of many burgeoning life sciences businesses in the state.

New Hampshire Life Sciences (NHLS) provides support to turn a big idea from a small team into a successful business. Though the organization is just a few years old, it’s already a catalyst for connecting early-stage companies with funding, mentorships and resources for long-term sustainability.

Cullinane, Kane and Kapas all attended Clarkson University together in various engineering disciplines.

“We were in all sorts of classes together, and definitely thick as thieves during that period,” Cullinane says. That included a senior project where they designed and built a rocket, including the fundraising needed.

“It really was sort of a mini startup experience, which was, unknowingly for us at the time, really good training for the future,” Cullinane says.