Funding profile · AI drug discovery
Nabla Bio
Thirty-seven million dollars of equity against more than $1.5 billion of announced, mostly contingent partnership value. No Form D has ever been filed under the company name, and no new round in 28 months.
Data as of September 23, 2026. Company-reported figures are labeled.
Rounds at a glance
| When | Round | Amount | Investors | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 to 2021 | Unannounced first round | Not disclosed | Led by Fifty Years | TechCrunch |
| Dec 6, 2021 | Seed, first priced round | $11.0M | Co-led by Khosla Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners; Fifty Years, Cantos Ventures, undisclosed others | Company release |
| May 14, 2024 | Series A | $26.0M | Led by Radical Ventures, all existing investors participating | Company release |
| May 2024 | Partnership value, three deals | “more than $550M” in upfront and milestone payments, plus royalties | AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Takeda | Company-stated |
| Oct 14, 2025 | Second Takeda collaboration | Double-digit millions upfront and research costs; success-based payments that “may exceed $1 billion” | Takeda | Company-stated |
| Sep 2026 | No round announced since the Series A | None | None | Not found |
What the filings show
Nabla Bio, Inc. · Form D · none on record
- Filings found
- None. SEC EDGAR company search returns no registrant named Nabla Bio.
- Full text search
- Three hits for the phrase “Nabla Bio” across all SEC filings, all of them Takeda’s.
- Reading
- Both rounds were sold without a Regulation D notice, or filed under a name that omits the phrase.
Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited · Form 20-F · filed Jun 17, 2026
- Fiscal year
- Ended Mar 31, 2026
- Entry
- Nabla Bio listed among Takeda’s principal alliances: “Research collaboration to discover novel protein sequences with Nabla’s AI and experimental technologies for drug design.”
- Amounts
- Not itemised. Takeda breaks out neither the upfront nor the milestone schedule.
- Filing
- SEC EDGAR, CIK 0001395064
Takeda annual integrated reports · filed as SEC exhibits · Jun 30, 2025 and Jun 24, 2026
- 2025 entry
- “With Nabla Bio, for example, we’re piloting a new protein design GenAI model that can shorten cycle times for drug discovery of therapeutic molecules.”
- 2026 entry
- Nabla Bio named alongside TetraScience and APHERIS as partners in Takeda’s AI ecosystem for early-stage development.
- Reading
- The language moves from piloting in 2025 to ecosystem partner in 2026.
Reading the filings
- The SEC record is almost empty.No Form D exists for either announced round. Companies that sell under Section 4(a)(2) rather than Regulation D file no Form D at all, so the absence is not evidence that money did not move: two releases, three venture firms and a lead investor post describe the same $37 million. It does mean there is no filed investor count, first-sale date or related-persons list to check the announcements against.
- Only one of three partners has a paper trail of its own.Of the three collaborations announced May 14, 2024, only Takeda appears in a public filing of its own. AstraZeneca is corroborated one step down, by two of its executives speaking on the record to Endpoints News. For Bristol Myers Squibb, no statement, release or filing naming Nabla Bio was found.
- Announced deal value runs about 42 times the equity raised.More than $550 million across three 2024 deals plus more than $1 billion for the 2025 Takeda contract gives over $1.55 billion of announced value against $37 million of equity. Almost all of it is success-based. The only cash figure either side confirms is double-digit millions upfront, a range spanning $10 million to $99 million.
- The company raised deliberately small.Its $26 million Series A landed the season Xaira Therapeutics launched on $1 billion and Generate:Biomedicines had taken in roughly $750 million: about 2.6 and 3.5 percent of those totals. The CEO told Endpoints News the company “raised what we needed, and we could have raised a lot more,” and Nabla says partner work offsets a significant portion of R&D expense. Its Y Combinator listing calls it revenue-generating.
- Twenty-eight months without an announced round.May 14, 2024 to September 23, 2026 is 28 months with no new equity disclosed, through a period in which the company shipped two major model releases and signed a billion-dollar-headline contract. Either partnership income is carrying the burn, or a round has closed without a Form D or an announcement to reveal it.
- Nothing in the record ties capital to a clinical asset.No registered trial, no FDA submission, no federal award, no named candidate. The company told Reuters in October 2025 it expects first-in-human data within one to two years. Until then the valuation case rests on partner behaviour.
Commercial signals
| Signal | Detail | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Repeat business | Takeda signed a second, broader collaboration in Oct 2025, weeks after exiting cell therapy research and cutting 137 R&D jobs in Massachusetts. | Public record |
| Partner disclosure | Nabla Bio named in Takeda’s Form 20-F and in two annual integrated reports filed with the SEC. | Public record |
| Revenue | Described as revenue-generating on its Y Combinator listing; no figure disclosed. | Company-stated |
| Headcount | Seven employees at the Dec 2021 seed; about fifteen in Jan 2025. No current figure found. | Independent |
| Pipeline | No owned programme announced. The CEO said in 2024 that it “seems almost selfish at this point to develop our own drugs.” | Independent |
| Technical evidence | Two bioRxiv preprints (Jan and May 2025); JAM-2 and the 2026 pMHC report published only as PDFs on the company’s servers. No peer-reviewed company paper found. | Not peer reviewed |
What to watch
- A Form D, or a Series B announcement. A Form D is due within 15 days of a first sale under Regulation D.
- Whether AstraZeneca or Bristol Myers Squibb name Nabla Bio in their own filings, as Takeda now does twice over.
- Any disclosed upfront figure. Double-digit millions spans a ten-fold range.
- First-in-human data, which the company placed between late 2026 and late 2027.
- Peer review of JAM-2 and the 2026 peptide-MHC report.
The Nabla Bio story on Healthcare DiscoveryHealthcare Discovery
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordTakeda Form 20-F, alliance table naming Nabla Bio
- Public recordTakeda 2025 and 2026 Annual Integrated Reports
- Public recordSEC EDGAR company and full text search for Nabla Bio, no Form D found
- CompanySeries A and collaborations announcement
- CompanySecond Takeda collaboration announcement
- IndependentNabla raised $26M, strikes three pharma deals
- IndependentNabla Bio raises $11M for an antibody design platform
- IndependentNabla Bio and Takeda expand AI drug design partnership
- IndependentBetter antibodies by engineering targets, not engineering antibodies
- CompanyNabla Bio company listing
Compiled from SEC records and published reports as of September 23, 2026. No Form D has been filed under Nabla Bio; the equity figures on this page come from company releases and independent reporting, not from Regulation D notices. Partnership values are announced upfront and milestone totals and are largely contingent. Healthcare Venture Capital Fund holds no position in Nabla Bio. This page is not an offer to sell or a recommendation to buy any security.
