About Us

Animerra was built on a simple but powerful conviction: that the companion animals we love deserve the same quality of therapeutic innovation that has transformed human medicine. Turning that conviction into reality takes more than great science — it takes a team with the experience to navigate every stage of the journey from discovery to clinic to market.

Our leadership brings together rare and complementary expertise across next-generation protein discovery and engineering, biologics manufacturing, and animal health therapeutic development. They have advanced biologics through human health and veterinary medicine, built and scaled life sciences companies, and guided novel therapies through the full arc of regulatory approval. Alongside them, our founding partner Anterra Capital brings deep domain expertise, a global network, and an unwavering focus on applying the best of life science innovation to underserved markets.

Together, this is the team building the next generation of veterinary biologics — for pets, and for the people who love them.

Anna Rath

Anna Rath is the Founding CEO and a Board Member of Animerra. Working together with Anterra Capital, she founded the company to apply cutting-edge technologies from the human pharmaceutical industry to one of the most underserved areas in medicine: the health of the animals we love.

A serial venture-backed CEO and founder, Anna has spent more than 20 years building breakthrough life sciences companies at the intersection of biology, technology, and sustainability. Most recently, she served as President & CEO of Vestaron, where she transformed a small R&D team into a globally recognized commercial leader in peptide-based crop protection, growing company value by more than 13x over her tenure. Before that, she founded NexSteppe, a bioeconomy feedstock company with operations across five continents. She holds a JD from Yale Law School and an MS in Genetics from the University of Michigan, and is the third-ever recipient of BIO’s Rosalind Franklin Award for Female Leadership in Industrial Biotechnology.

At Animerra, Anna is bringing the hard-won lessons of two decades commercializing novel biologics — navigating complex regulatory pathways, scaling manufacturing for novel modalities, building commercial infrastructure, and taking breakthrough science to market — to the emerging frontier of next-generation companion animal therapeutics.

Kyle Schneider

Kyle Schneider is the Vice President of Research at Animerra, where he directs internal and external biologics discovery programs, overseeing strategy and execution from target identification through therapeutic design and candidate optimization.

Kyle brings more than a decade of experience in discovery and engineering of biologics. Most recently, he was Senior Director and group lead at Vestaron, where he led the discovery and transformation of nature-inspired insecticidal peptides into commercial products, including the EPA-approved bioinsecticide Ta1b-QA. Prior to Vestaron, Kyle was a Fellow in Antibody Engineering at Genentech, where he explored the cell-penetration potential of single-domain antibodies. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and M.S. from Yale University. Kyle is a former Goldwater Scholar, NSF Fellow, and recipient of the prestigious U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Outstanding Young Engineer award.

Kyle is interested in leveraging next-generation protein modalities to expand the capabilities of biologics beyond conventional formats, with an emphasis on underexplored biotechnology fields and applications. At Animerra, he applies this approach to address disease biology in companion animals and drive meaningful clinical outcomes for pets and their owners.

Jess Wofford

Jess Wofford is Vice President of Development at Animerra, where she leads the strategy that connects discovery to clinical success across the company’s portfolio of next-generation biologics for companion animals. She is responsible for integrating discovery and clinical strategy, turning early scientific insights into in vivo development plans to advance novel therapies toward regulatory approval.

Jess has built her career advancing therapeutics from early discovery through approval and launch across a range of disease areas in dogs and cats. She earned her PhD in Pharmacology from Duke University, where she developed a foundation in basic science, followed by a DVM from North Carolina State University, where she applied that perspective to clinical medicine. She brought this combined perspective into drug development at Aratana Therapeutics, contributing to the development and approval of multiple products, and went on to leadership roles at Elanco Animal Health and Boehringer Ingelheim. In these roles, she has led programs and contributed to portfolio decisions through key development milestones, from candidate selection through pivotal studies and post-approval support.

At Animerra, Jess brings a clear focus on the end goal: safe, effective, and differentiated therapies. She focuses on shaping programs with a defined path to clinical success and regulatory approval from the outset, using data-driven strategies to prioritize the right molecules and de-risk development early. She views development not as a downstream function, but as a strategic lens for guiding discovery and shaping research, ensuring that new science results in therapies that expand the spectrum of care for cats and dogs.

Eugene Antipov

Eugene Antipov is Vice President of Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) at Animerra, where he leads process and analytical development and oversees manufacturing strategy from early-stage design through clinical execution and regulatory submission. He is responsible for translating Animerra’s discovery platform into scalable, high-quality, and cost-effective biologic products.

Eugene earned his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering from MIT and began his career in industrial biotechnology, engineering microorganisms to produce specialty chemicals at commercial scale. He later spent over a decade at early-stage human health biotech companies, advancing protein- and cell-based therapeutics across oncology, autoimmune, and metabolic diseases — building and leading CMC organizations, managing CDMO partnerships, executing manufacturing campaigns, and supporting regulatory filings across multiple stages of development.

At Animerra, Eugene brings together industrial-scale manufacturing rigor and deep technical expertise in complex biologics to tackle one of the central challenges in animal health: delivering advanced therapies that are both effective and economically viable. He views CMC as a strategic driver of innovation and is focused on enabling next-generation biologics to reach the market at accessible cost.

Phil Austin

Phil Austin is a Founder and Managing Partner at Anterra Capital, where he leads the firm’s US office and Life Sciences investment team.

Trained as both a pharmaceutical chemist and chemical engineer, Phil has built his career around a single compelling idea: that the tools and breakthroughs developed for human medicine hold enormous untapped potential far beyond the clinic. From his early work in industrial biotech at McKinsey & Company and Atlas Venture, to his current focus at Anterra Capital, he has consistently sought out the intersection where life science innovation meets underserved markets.

At Anterra, Phil’s portfolio spans agriculture, animal health, and nutritional wellness — sectors he sees as ripe for transformation by the same technologies reshaping human therapeutics. He is a passionate advocate for applying the depth and dynamism of the pharma ecosystem to build world-class biotech companies in what he calls ‘orphan’ industrial sectors: areas of enormous importance that have historically been overlooked by mainstream life science investors.