Sable Bio, a London-based AI startup focused on drug safety, has raised $3.75 million in seed funding to expand 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.
The financing follows Sable’s $2 million pre-seed round in late 2023 and comes as the company says it has signed commercial agreements with multiple pharmaceutical companies, including three top ten global pharma firms, as well as biotechs and investment groups. Over the past twelve months, Sable reports $0.5 million in revenue, which it frames as early evidence of demand for systems that can surface target safety risks well before they become expensive issues in later development stages.
Sable is targeting a long-standing pain point in pharmaceutical research and development, where unexpected toxicity remains a leading driver of clinical trial failures and a major source of wasted time and capital. Traditional target safety assessments often rely on literature reviews, preclinical testing, and expert judgment. As biomedical data volumes continue to grow, manual and fragmented workflows can struggle to keep up with the speed and scale required by modern drug discovery teams.
The company’s platform aims to address this bottleneck by bringing together diverse data sources into a unified safety assessment framework. Sable says it uses bespoke models to extract safety-relevant information from millions of papers and reports, then applies causal inference methods to separate true safety signals from noise. The result is a ranked set of insights intended to help scientists prioritize concerns, mitigate risk earlier, and plan more effectively as programs progress.
With the new capital, Sable plans to expand its London-based team, accelerate product development, and integrate real-world evidence into its workflows. The company is also seeking additional partnerships with biotech, pharmaceutical, and healthtech organizations that want to strengthen target safety capabilities as AI adoption expands across more stages of the drug discovery process.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
Nitish Malhotra, Investor, MMC Ventures
“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.”
Josh Almond-Thynne, Co-Founder And CEO, Sable Bio
“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.”
Olly Oechsle, CTO, Sable Bio
