Drug Safety startup Sable Bio raises $3.75M in a Seed round

Sable Bio, a London-based AI startup focused on drug safety, has raised $3.75 million in seed funding to scale its platform that helps pharmaceutical companies identify safety risks earlier in drug discovery. The round was led by MMC Ventures, with participation from existing investors Episode 1 Ventures and Seedcamp.

Since its $2 million pre-seed in late 2023, Sable has secured commercial agreements with multiple pharmaceutical companies, including three top-ten global pharma firms, alongside biotechs and investment groups, generating $0.5 million in revenue in the past twelve months. These early customers demonstrate strong demand for tools that surface safety risks long before they become costly clinical failures.

Unexpected toxicity remains the leading cause of clinical trial failures, costing the pharmaceutical industry billions every year. Target safety assessments rely on literature reviews, preclinical testing, and expert judgment.  Manual processes cannot keep pace with the growing volume of biomedical data now available to drug discovery teams.

Sable’s AI-powered platform addresses this bottleneck by 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.

“Drug safety remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in pharmaceutical R&D, yet it is still dominated by manual, fragmented workflows,” said Nitish Malhotra, Investor at MMC Ventures. “Sable Bio is building a genuinely differentiated safety intelligence platform - one that leading pharma teams are already using to make faster, higher-confidence decisions. We’re excited to be backing a team with a combination of deep domain expertise, strong early commercial traction, and a clear path to becoming a system of record for safety assessment.”

“The pharmaceutical industry has made tremendous strides in AI for hit identification and lead optimisation, but target safety assessment has lagged behind,” Josh Almond-Thynne, co-founder and CEO. “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.”

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

Sable plans to use the new 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.