Eric Bernabei, MBA

Business Development Advisor & Board Member

Eric Bernabei is a commercial and corporate development executive with 25+ years building and scaling healthcare ventures across gene therapy, pharma, diagnostics, and medical devices. As a multi-time CEO and C-suite operator, he has repeatedly taken companies from concept to revenue—growing a genomics diagnostics business from launch to over $90M in year one and more than $400M within three years, securing one of the earliest U.S. commercial EUAs in COVID testing, and driving a pathogen-detection startup from acquisition to commercialization in 24 months. His regulatory and capital-markets fluency spans FDA registrations, first-in-human study planning, and fundraising across Pre-seed to Series B, SPAC, and M&A transactions—including a merger that raised $40M in equity and debt. Having led global product launches and country-level P&Ls inside major multinationals such as Alcon—where he helped drive the worldwide launch of PanOptix and led a $400M surgical business in Japan—Eric pairs large-company operating discipline with founder-level agility across U.S., EMEA, and APAC markets. He currently serves as CEO of Glaive Medical Optics, where he is building the integrated IP, regulatory, and go-to-market strategy for an implantable vision-restoration platform targeting AMD and Stargardt's disease, and he holds board and advisory roles with PNDS Medical, Macuject, UCSF and is mentor to startups in the U.S. NSF AccelCorps program. The result is an operator who de-risks and builds value through the full arc of a venture—science to regulatory approval to commercial scale to exit.