Though nerves abound for funders and founders in the industry, money continues to flow into startups, sometimes in eye-popping numbers. BioSpace rounds up the biggest raises so far this year.
Financing across the biopharmaceutical industry is at a painful crawl. Nowhere is this clearer than in the venture capital realm. Research from Citeline and Pitchbook showed that VC fundraising for biopharmas has been dropping for four straight quarters and has generally been trending downward since the pandemic-induced rush of money into the industry in 2021.
However, some firms are still managing to scare up large venture rounds in 2025, and series A and series B funding rounds are ticking up, according to a report from biopulse. Research from PitchBook shows that though the number of raises and the total amount raised fell slightly in Q2 2025, for the past five quarters it has held steady at around $8 billion–$9 billion per quarter.
Here BioSpace recaps the biggest raises of the year so far, all of which fall into hot research areas such as AI and obesity.
Isomorphic Labs
- Amount raised: $600 million
- Disease area: Not disclosed
The biggest raise of the first half of the year went to Isomorphic Labs, a spinout of Google’s DeepMind division that garnered $600 million in March to create new AI-designed drugs. Although the company has no published pipeline and hasn’t announced any disease targets, only mentioning “challenging disease areas” in a blog post, the company expects to start clinical trials for newly discovered molecules by the end of 2025. Isomorphic has already bagged big partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis that together total nearly $3 billion in biobucks. Now valued at nearly $1.8 billion, the company is one of a handful of biotech unicorns, all of which are built on AI.
- Verdiva Bio
- Amount raised: $411 million
- Disease area: Obesity and metabolism
While pharma giants like Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are leading the obesity field, a suite of smaller companies are betting on next-generation therapies to get ahead of the curve. Right around the time of the JP Morgan Conference in January, Verdiva Bio joined them with a $411 million series A. That money is going toward a pipeline of obesity drugs formulations licensed from the Chinese biotech Sciwind Biosciences. That includes an oral, once-per-week GLP-1 drug, as well as two amylin assets, one administered orally and one subcutaneously.
- Pathos AI
- Amount raised: $365 million
- Disease area: Prostate cancer and other tumor types
Following Isomorphic Labs’ gargantuan raise, Pathos, another AI-powered biopharma startup, got a $365 million series D in May to continue developing its oncology pipeline, bringing its total capital raised to $1.6 billion. Despite being an AI-focused company, its lead asset, pocenbrodib, was licensed from Novo Nordisk, which got it from Forma Therapeutics. Pocenbrodib is currently in a Phase Ib/IIa trial for patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Another molecule the company is pursuing is P-500, a brain-penetrant drug licensed from Prelude Therapeutics for treating brain cancers.
- Eikon Therapeutics
- Amount raised: $351 million
- Disease areas: Several, including cancer, inflammation and neurological diseases
Eikon, another biotech unicorn with a valuation of $1.85 billion, added a $351 million series D to an already impressive funding haul in February. The new money is going towards EIK1001, a Toll-like receptor agonist for treating advanced melanoma. Eikon showed off some preliminary results at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting last year, including a 14% complete or partial response rate. According to CEO Roger Perlmutter, the company has its eye on an eventual IPO.
- Numab Therapeutics
- Amount raised: $227 million
- Disease areas: Immunology and cancer using multispecific antibodies
Founded back in 2011, in January Numab grabbed an extra $55 million in an extended series C, bringing the total raise for the round to about $227 million. That adds to an already significant ledger after Numab spun off NM26, an investigational bi-specific antibody for atopic dermatitis, into a new company called Yellow Jersey Therapeutics and then sold Yellow Jersey to Johnson & Johnson in 2024 for $1.25 billion. The new raise is going toward furthering the company’s inflammation and oncology pipeline, including its lead asset, NM32, a T cell engager for solid tumors and hematological cancers.
