Sable Bio secures seed funding to tackle drug target safety
Sable Bio, a London-based AI drug safety startup, said it has raised €3.2 million in seed funding to scale its platform and grow its team in the UK capital. The round was led by MMC Ventures, with participation from existing backers Episode 1 Ventures and Seedcamp.
Co-founder and CEO Dr Josh Almond-Thynne said the pharmaceutical sector has advanced rapidly in applying AI to hit identification and lead optimisation, but that target safety assessment has not kept pace. He said the new funding will support the company’s ambition to build a “definitive platform” for drug target safety by making safety data more accessible and actionable.
Addressing a costly bottleneck in R&D
Founded in 2023 by former BenevolentAI scientists Dr Alex de Giorgio and Dr Josh Almond-Thynne, Sable Bio develops an AI-powered system aimed at producing predictive safety insights earlier in drug discovery. The company argues that unexpected toxicity remains a leading cause of clinical trial failure, driving billions of dollars in losses across the industry each year.
According to the startup, traditional target safety work relies heavily on literature reviews, preclinical testing and expert judgement—processes that are increasingly strained by the growing volume of biomedical data. Sable Bio says its platform integrates diverse sources into a unified assessment framework, using bespoke models to extract safety-relevant information from millions of papers and reports. The company also applies causal inference techniques to distinguish meaningful signals from noise, providing scientists with ranked insights to support earlier risk mitigation.
Commercial traction and next steps
CTO Olly Oechsle said the platform is designed to connect critical datasets that currently inform drug safety science, with plans to expand into additional use cases across drug discovery. The company said that since closing an oversubscribed €1.7 million pre-seed round in February 2024, it has signed commercial agreements with multiple pharmaceutical companies, including three top-ten global pharma firms, and generated more than €400,000 in revenue over the past 12 months.
MMC Ventures investor Nitish Malhotra said drug safety remains dominated by manual, fragmented workflows and described Sable Bio as a differentiated safety intelligence platform already used by leading pharma teams. The startup said it will use the funding to expand its London team, accelerate product development and integrate real-world evidence, while pursuing additional partnerships across biotech, pharma and healthtech.
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