Dive Brief:

• A year after negotiating a $1 billion sale to GSK, a group of former Aiolos Bio executives are starting a well-funded new drugmaker promising to deliver better obesity treatments.
• Verdiva Bio announced its launch Thursday alongside $411 million in Series A financing, the third-largest funding round since the beginning of 2022 among the top venture capital firms tracked by BioPharma Dive. Forbion and General Atlantic led the financing, with participation from RA Capital Management, OrbiMed, Logos Capital, Lilly Asia Ventures and LYFE Capital.
• Former Aiolos CEO Khurem Farooq will take the top post at Verdiva with a management team that includes Chief Scientific Officer Jane Hughes, Chief Business Officer Tapan Maniar and Chief Technology Officer Ashley Taylor, who all held the same posts at Aiolos. Mark Pruzanski, the former CEO of Versanis Bio and founder of Intercept Pharmaceuticals, was named chairman.

Dive Insight:

Verdiva joins a long list of obesity drug startups launched over the last year, including Metsera, Antag Therapeutics, SixPeaks Bio, Pep2Tango Therapeutics and Kailera Therapeutics, which emerged from stealth just months ago with a $400 million financing.

All of the newcomers are eyeing the booming market for obesity drugs dominated by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. And they’re promising to offer better options in the form of pills or longer-lasting alternatives to the injectable medicines that are now raking in billions of dollars.

The startups are not alone. Drugmakers large and small are racing to develop new obesity medicines, and both Novo and Lilly have successors in the works. Biopharma investment in metabolic treatments more than tripled between 2023 and 2024, according to data compiled by HSBC’s Innovation Banking division.

Verdiva says it has an experimental treatment in the same GLP-1 class as Novo’s Wegovy and Lilly’s Zepbound that can be administered once a week and is ready for Phase 2 testing. It’s also developing a once-weekly oral medicine known as an amylin agonist that could be used alone or in combination with a GLP-1 treatment, as well as a long-acting injectable amylin agonist.

The new company is part of a growing trend in the industry, looking to China to pluck effective medicines to develop or build a company around. Verdiva licensed its portfolio from China’s Sciwind Biosciences and has rights to the drugs outside greater China and South Korea.

Kailera, Candid Therapeutics and Aiolos also built companies based on medicines acquired from Chinese drugmakers. And in the last year, Merck licensed from China experimental drugs for autoimmune disease, obesity and cancer.