Steve Pascolo is a co-founder of CureVac. The company was founded in Tübingen in 2000 by Ingmar Hoerr, Steve Pascolo and Florian von der Mülbe, with the academic co-founders Günther Jung and Hans-Georg Rammensee.
The idea came from Hoerr's doctoral work, done in Jung's institute in cooperation with Rammensee's group. It showed that stabilised mRNA does not decay at once in mice. Hoerr filed a first mRNA patent on 9 September 1999.
CureVac won a Baden-Württemberg innovation prize in 2007 and a €2 million EU vaccine prize in 2014. By 2017 it had raised about €305 million in equity and was valued at €1.4 billion.
In 2020 the German state bank KfW paid €300 million for about 23%, and CureVac went public on Nasdaq on 14 August, raising $213 million. The Covid candidate CVnCoV showed 47% efficacy in June 2021 and was dropped in October 2021. BioNTech completed its takeover on 18 December 2025.