Just when you thought there couldn’t be investor appetite for yet another GLP-1-focused obesity biotech, Verdiva Bio has arrived on the scene with an eye-popping series A.
The London-headquartered company has persuaded backers to put down $410 million in the oversubscribed funding round, which CEO Khurem Farooq told Fierce is “probably the largest” series A ever gathered by a U.K.-based biotech.
With Forbion and General Atlantic leading a round that also involved RA Capital Management, Orbimed, Logos Capital, Lilly Asia Ventures and Lyfe Capital, the biotech’s executives explained to Fierce that it was a combination of previous relationships with some of these investors and excitement with its pipeline that secured such a hefty prize.

The pipeline in question consists of three candidates that have been licensed from China’s Sciwind Biosciences. They are headed up by an oral GLP-1 agonist that Verdiva believes will stand out from the crowd by offering weekly dosing—unlike the various daily-dosed oral candidates in development across various biopharma competitors.
Having taken a look at data from a phase 1 trial conducted by Sciwind, Verdiva Chief Medical Officer Mohamed Eid, M.D., told Fierce that the biotech believes its weekly option has “potential [to] beat the magnitude of weight loss” seen by other players in the oral weight loss space.
The other two assets in Verdiva’s pipeline are a once-weekly oral amylin agonist and a long-acting, subcutaneous amylin agonist.
The plan is to start a phase 2 study of the GLP-1 agonist this year, while “accelerating on all cylinders” to take the amylin candidates into the clinic “as soon as possible,” said Eid, who has moved over to Verdiva from Boehringer Ingelheim. Verdiva also has its eye on assessing the oral amylin agonist in a co-formulated tablet with the GLP-1 agonist, as well as offering the subcutaneous amylin agonist in combination with a proprietary GLP-1 peptide.
Not all of the biotech’s newfound cash will be used for its clinical ambitions, however. The company is also holding back some funds to “potentially bring in additional assets as well,” Farooq said.
“Our vision is to build a cardio-metabolic company for the long term,” said the CEO, although he wouldn’t be pinned down on exactly what sort of assets are top of the biotech’s shopping list. “I think it goes with the philosophy of first-in-class and best-in-class,” he said.
Farooq and a number of Verdiva’s senior leadership—like Chief Scientific Officer Jane Hughes, Ph.D.—hail from Aiolos Bio. The asthma-focused company was scooped up by GSK just 77 days after launching. So, is Farooq expecting Big Pharmas to start circling Verdiva quite as quickly?
“No, that's not our goal,” said the CEO, although he accepted that what he sees as the “best-in-class, first-in-class potential” of Verdiva’s current pipeline means it “would appeal to pharma as well.”
“You never know what happens,” he added. “But our intent and the size of the raise that we have pulled together signals our belief in what we are doing for the long term.”
Verdiva, which also has a U.S. base in San Francisco's Bay Area, isn’t ruling out the possibility of an IPO at some point down the line, although Farooq said the company has yet to make this decision.
“We've got a sizable round, but as you know, when you start phase 3 programs they're large and expensive studies,” he said. “So it would be one of the routes that we would be considering for sure.”