Eli Lilly is paying up to 3.8 billion dollars for a company built on treating depression with psychedelic compounds, and one German investor is walking away from the deal roughly 360 million dollars richer before taxes.
Christian Angermayer, 48, holds a 15 percent stake in AtaiBeckley, the company formed in 2025 when Atai and Beckley Psytech merged. Eli Lilly is paying 2.8 billion dollars upfront for the company, with as much as 1 billion dollars more available through milestone payments tied to the drugs in its pipeline. Angermayer's stake alone turns roughly 100 million dollars invested over the years into about 360 million dollars in proceeds, on top of a net worth Forbes puts at 1.2 billion dollars.
What Eli Lilly actually bought is a pipeline aimed at FDA approval for psychedelic medicine, led by a drug called BPL 003, a fast acting nasal spray built around mebufotenin benzoate, a form of 5 MeO DMT, aimed at treatment resistant depression. Behind BPL 003 sit other candidates in development, including DMT related sublingual strips and compounds related to MDMA.
Angermayer's involvement in psychedelics goes back further than most investors in the space. He cofounded Compass Pathways in 2017, then cofounded Atai the same year with a focus on DMT research, well before big pharmaceutical companies were willing to put real money behind the idea. He has pointed to a mushroom experience over Easter in 2014, on a trip to a Caribbean island, as the moment that shifted his thinking, followed by another trip on December 29, 2017, shortly before a meeting in New York with investor Mike Novogratz that helped set the current path in motion.
Psychedelics are only one piece of what Angermayer does. He runs Apeiron, a fund managing about 2.5 billion dollars in assets, with a portfolio that includes Enhanced Games, BlackRock Neurotech, and Cambrian Bio, spreading his bets across performance science, brain computer interfaces, and biotech alongside mental health.
Angermayer has been blunt about where he thinks all of this is headed. The future is psychedelic, he has said, and it is here. For Eli Lilly, betting 3.8 billion dollars on that future is now part of its own pipeline. For Angermayer, it is proof that a decade spent on a field most investors avoided just paid off in a very big way.