David Nikzad

Businessperson

David Nikzad is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur based in Hawaii who founded the psychedelic wellness company EI.ventures in July 2019. He began his career in the Washington, DC techno club scene and later brought his business acumen to angel investing. Over the past two and a half decades, Nikzad has supported ventures spanning the nightlife, tech, real estate, and wellness industries. 

Nikzad is the Executive Chairman of his holding company, Orthogonal Thinker, which is described on its website as a socially conscious wellness platform. Orthogonal is focused on a new “Farma” paradigm of food and psychoactive compounds as medicine and has nearly two dozen holdings as of summer 2021.

Orthogonal subsidiary EI.ventures engages in research and development to produce legal, therapeutic “nutritional alkaloids” for personal use. It also leverages technology to generate personalized formulas to support customers’ mental health. 

According to an interview on Proactive, Nikzad started the company after launching his wellness retreat center, Lumeria, in Maui. Through Lumeria, Nikzad met local “kitchen chemists” who were strategically integrating heirloom botanicals into targeted health products. It was at that time that Nikzad and first encountered psychoactive plant compounds and experienced their therapeutic capacity. 

Nikzad told Proactive journalist Christine Corrado that all EI products are to be taken in “very low dosage,” and are 100% botanical. He shared that EI’s “crown jewel” product, a psilocybin-based formulation called Psilly, can be taken at a 1-milligram dose. Psilly is intended to begin Phase 1A and Phase 1B preclinical trials in 2021. According to the interview, other products in EI’s pipeline include MyMDMA and MyDMT.

Nikzad stated in the Proactive interview, “Our one desire is to take a product to market at $1 [per] dose. We understand that we can manufacture these products at around five to 10 cents per milligram. We believe even going through the full FDA trials, even if it costs us 500 billion, we will be plenty profitable at $1 [per] dose.”

EI’s nutraceutical products include “Brain Mana,” a non-psychoactive version of Psilly. In a Psychedelic Invest interview, Nikzad said of EI’s market trajectory, “Our timeline is five years. We don’t want to be the first company to go out into the space. We want to be the most effective company.” He also discussed what differentiates EI’s business model, saying, “We are moving toward having a Drug Master File (DMF) with the FDA, which will put us above what we call a patent status. The DMF will allow us to partner with other companies and governments to open-source our product.”