Sable Bio secures £2.7m pre-seed to identify target toxicity using AI models
This article covers Sable Bio, a biotech startup, which has raised £2.7m in a pre-seed funding round to expand its AI platform for drug target safety. The funding is intended to accelerate product development, integrate real-world evidence into its models and grow its team to help pharmaceutical discovery teams spot toxicity risks earlier in the discovery timeline.
Sable Bio has raised £2.7m in a pre-seed funding round to expand its AI platform for drug target safety and help pharmaceutical teams spot toxicity risks earlier in discovery. The London-based biotech startup says the capital will accelerate product development, bring real-world evidence into its models and grow its team—moves that matter because unexpected toxicity remains a leading cause of clinical trial failures and late-stage expense for drug developers.
Why it matters
Unexpected toxicity is a major bottleneck in pharmaceutical R&D, contributing to costly late-stage failures. Sable’s early commercial traction underlines demand for better safety workflows: since a £1.5m pre-seed in late 2023, the company has signed commercial agreements with multiple pharmaceutical companies, including three top-ten global pharma firms, and generated about £0.4m in revenue in the past 12 months.
Manual literature reviews and fragmented preclinical pipelines struggle to keep up with the growing volume of biomedical data. If Sable can reliably surface safety signals sooner, it could reduce downstream costs and decision uncertainty for discovery teams.
Inside the product
Sable’s platform combines bespoke machine learning models with causal inference methods to pull safety-relevant information from millions of papers and reports and to separate true safety signals from background noise. The output is a ranked set of insights intended to help scientists prioritise potential risks and plan mitigation earlier in the discovery timeline.
The company also plans to integrate real-world evidence into its assessments, a step that aims to broaden the data inputs used to evaluate target risk. The new funding is earmarked for product development, hiring in London, and expanded partnerships with biotech, pharmaceutical, and healthtech organisations.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by MMC Ventures, with participation from existing backers Episode 1 Ventures and Seedcamp.
In the announcement, Nitish Malhotra, Investor at MMC Ventures, said:
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.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Josh Almond-Thynne, Co-founder & CEO at Sable Bio, said:
We’re thrilled that with this funding, we can build the definitive platform for drug target safety.
In the announcement, Olly Oechsle, CTO at Sable Bio, said:
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.
The bigger picture
The raise comes as AI-driven discovery tools gain traction across Europe, but target safety assessment has lagged behind applications such as hit identification and lead optimisation. The deal reflects growing interest from UK biotech investors in software that aims to reduce the likelihood of expensive late-stage failures.
Sable’s progress—commercial deals with large pharma names, recurring revenue and a pipeline of product improvements—will be one to watch for those tracking how UK startups are applying AI to long-standing drug development problems. Improvements in safety assessment could have downstream effects across European drug development and clinical pipeline efficiency.
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