London-based biotech Verdiva Bio has raised $410m in one of Europe’s largest ever Series A rounds, led by life sciences investor Forbion and US VC General Atlantic, as it looks to develop weight loss drugs for the buzzy GLP-1 market.
Founded in July last year, Verdiva has today emerged from stealth with a huge round that also saw participation from investors including Lilly Asia Ventures — the venture arm of Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant which has seen its valuation skyrocket after the release of new weight loss drugs in recent times — RA Capital Management, OrbiMed, Logos Capital and LYFE Capital.
Verdiva — which also has an office in San Francisco — is not developing new drugs and treatments from scratch. It acquired the development and commercialisation rights of a pipeline of assets — including an oral-based GLP-1 drug similar to market brands like Ozempic and Wegovy — from Chinese biotech Sciwind Biosciences in 2024.
Most GLP-1 drugs — which have seen a meteoric rise over the past two years — are delivered via an injection, but a number of pharma companies are now racing to develop a less-invasive oral version of the drug.
“People living with obesity and its complications deserve better options at each stage of their treatment journey, including oral therapies with less frequent dosing regimens,” said CEO Khurem Farooq in a statement. “We created Verdiva Bio to accelerate the development of differentiated medicines that address these significant unmet medical needs.”
A long road ahead
The company’s most mature asset is the oral-based GLP-1 drug, which it says has completed phase one trials and is ready for phase two — where the drug is tested on a larger number of people.
Even if it’s successful, Verdiva’s oral GLP-1 will still be years off hitting the shelves, having to complete phase three trials first — which involve testing the drug on hundreds or thousands of people. Most drugs don’t make it through clinical trials.
CEO Farooq has been on the journey before; he was previously CEO of San Francisco- and London-based Aiolos Bio, a drug developer making treatments for respiratory disease and other immunological disorders, which sold to pharma giant GSK for $1bn last year.
Up until now, funding for startups has been limited in the nascent weight loss sector in Europe, and primarily limited to companies focused on distributing the drug to patients, as opposed to developing drugs themselves.
The round comes on the back of Amsterdam-based VC Forbion closing more than €2bn in new funds in October last year. General Atlantic also stumped up all the cash for UK period tracking app Flo’s $200m round in August 2024.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/verdiva-bio-biggest-series-a-raise/
