If you watched neuropsychiatry at all in the 2010s, you know Jeff Jonas.

He ran Sage Therapeutics when it was minting a new category of rapid-acting antidepressants. He did it with Al Robichaud, who was Sage’s chief scientific officer.

Well, now the band is back together and it’s called Tortugas Neuroscience.

Today Tortugas emerged from stealth with $106 million in combined seed and Series A financing. Cure Ventures, The Column Group, and AN Ventures are in. The previous seed was roughly $30M with Column leading.

So today’s piece is the Series A expansion, and it’s pretty sizable for a company that hasn’t published a single data point.

But here’s what actually makes this interesting.

Tortugas didn’t spend that money building a discovery engine. Instead, they went shopping and in-licensed two clinical-stage oral small molecules, one from Eisai and one from Hansoh. Both are already in humans.

Both are oral, once-daily and ready to move.

The target list reads like a tour of underserved CNS: schizophrenia, focal epilepsy, tinnitus, and reversible encephalopathies.

Tinnitus – ringing in your ears – is the one that stands out to me…seems random, but hear me out.

There are ~25 million Americans that deal with chronic tinnitus and there is no approved pharmacologic treatment. Big pharma has mostly stayed away, probably because the science is messy and the endpoints are complicated.

So, running an oral small molecule at it is a bold swing.

Schizophrenia is the other big one. After Bristol Myers’ Cobenfy approval last year, the field busted wide open. It seems like everyone and their mother is suddenly pursuing non-dopaminergic antipsychotics. Tortugas now has an asset in that arena — without the years of trudging through discovery work.

Data reads are going to come soon. That’s the whole point of starting from clinical-stage molecules.

And remember, this team has done this before…so keep your eye on this because it’s going to move fast.