UK AI drug safety startup Sable Bio raises €3.15 million; plans to grow its London team

Sable Bio, a London-based AI drug safety startup, today announced that it has raised €3.2 million in Seed funding to scale its platform. 

The round was led by MMC Ventures, with participation from existing investors Episode 1 Ventures and Seedcamp.

“The pharmaceutical industry has made tremendous strides in AI for hit identification and lead optimisation, but target safety assessment has lagged behind. Sable is positioned to change that by making comprehensive safety data accessible and actionable. We’re thrilled that with this funding, we can build the definitive platform for drug target safety,” said Dr Josh Almond-Thynne, co-founder and CEO of Sable Bio. 

Founded in 2023 by former BenevolentAI scientists Dr Alex de Giorgio and Dr Josh Almond-Thynne, Sable Bio develops an AI-powered platform that provides predictive safety insights to mitigate the risk of clinical trial failure. 

According to Sable Bio, clinical trial failures are still primarily caused by unexpected toxicity, resulting in billions of dollars in costs to the pharmaceutical industry every year. The company states that target safety assessments rely on literature reviews, preclinical testing, and expert judgment. And with the increasing volume of biomedical data that drug discovery teams now have access to, manual processes are becoming increasingly inadequate.

The UK BioTech startup claims to be addressing this bottleneck with its AI-powered platform, integrating diverse data sources into a unified safety assessment framework. “Bespoke models extract safety-relevant information from millions of papers and reports, while causal inference methods separate true safety signals from noise. Scientists receive ranked insights that highlight critical concerns and enable earlier risk mitigation and planning,” the company mentioned in the press release. 

“We’ve built Sable to integrate crucial data from diverse sources. These datasets currently feed drug safety science, and we’re excited about expanding into other use cases to support different disciplines in drug discovery,” said Olly Oechsle, CTO of Sable Bio. 

In February 2024, the company announced the successful closure of its oversubscribed €1.7 million pre-Seed funding round, led by Episode1 Ventures and supported by Seedcamp.

Sable Bio reports that since its pre-Seed round, it has secured commercial agreements with multiple pharmaceutical companies, including three top-ten global pharma firms, alongside biotechs and investment groups. It also states that it has generated over €400k ($0.5 million) in revenue in the past twelve months.

“Drug safety remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in pharmaceutical R&D, yet it is still dominated by manual, fragmented workflows. Sable Bio is building a genuinely differentiated safety intelligence platform – one that leading pharma teams are already using to make faster, higher-confidence decisions,” said Nitish Malhotra, investor at MMC Ventures.

The company aims to deploy this fresh capital to expand its London-based team, accelerate product development, and integrate real-world evidence. The company is actively seeking additional partnerships with BioTech, pharmaceutical, and healthtech organisations looking to strengthen their target safety capabilities.

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