One of biotech’s best-funded startups has just raised a huge new round to take its lead drug into final-stage testing.
On Wednesday, Eikon Therapeutics announced a $351 million Series D round, one of the biggest financings of the year so far. But in a sign of the times, investors and the Bay Area startup agreed to cut the company’s valuation from its 2023 round, showing that even biotechs with Eikon’s pedigree aren’t immune from market trends.
“We had to adjust Eikon’s valuation to reflect this environment,” CEO Roger Perlmutter confirmed to
Endpoints News
. Perlmutter declined to disclose the new valuation beyond saying it “fairly reflects the state of the market.” Eikon had a $3.6 billion valuation following
its Series C
, according to PitchBook data.
Despite the down-round, Perlmutter described Eikon as moving from “strength to strength” in
advancing the Nobel Prize-winning microscope science
at the heart of its 2019 founding. The company has built its own lab instruments to observe and analyze lit-up proteins moving inside living cells. It now has about 425 employees and is still growing. Its lead drug candidate, a TLR7/8 co-agonist called EIK1001, has started a Phase 3 study in skin cancer. And the broader pipeline is also progressing, Perlmutter said, with encouraging initial clinical results.
“At this early point, these studies are looking very good, and we’re enthusiastic about that and eager to pour fuel on the fire,” Perlmutter said.
The megaround ranks as biotech’s second largest raise so far in 2025, outranked only by obesity startup
Verdiva Bio’s $411 million launch
in January. The Series D syndicate was primarily made up of previous Eikon backers, like Lux Capital, The Column Group, Foresite Capital, Soros Capital, General Catalyst and others.
Perlmutter said he wouldn’t be surprised if more investors join the Series D later this year. The press release described the $351 million as an “initial close” for the round. As for a potential IPO, Perlmutter framed going public as a matter of when, not if.
“I am confident that Eikon Therapeutics will be a public company,” he said, describing the current IPO market as not completely dead. “There is room for special companies to go public, and we are a special company. Clearly, there is a lot of interest in the question of whether or not we can go public. We’ll choose the right time to do that as it makes sense.”
Since Perlmutter joined as CEO in 2021, Eikon has become one of the largest biotech startups, as shown by its $518 million Series B in January 2022. Perlmutter previously led R&D at Amgen and Merck, and has recruited several Merck alumni to Eikon, including Roy Baynes as chief medical officer.
While the microscopic technology is at Eikon’s core, the company in-licensed several drug programs in 2023 to jumpstart its pipeline. EIK1001, for example, was brought in from Seven and Eight Biopharmaceuticals, and the first advanced melanoma patient was identified in December for a registration-enabling Phase 3 study, Perlmutter said.
Eikon also has a PARP1 inhibitor, EIK1003, in Phase 1 cancer studies, and a brain-penetrant version called EIK1004 that recently had its IND accepted by the FDA.
And its first internal molecule is expected to enter the clinic “very soon,” Perlmutter said. Called EIK1005, that program inhibits an enzyme involved in DNA damage repair called the Werner syndrome helicase, or WRN.
As for Eikon’s microscopes, Perlmutter said they’ve made its lab equipment smaller and more powerful over the past couple of years. But he wants to build a drug company, not sell microscopes, and he said the current research environment doesn’t support an instrument business. (Perlmutter had at one point considered creating a spinoff to sell the equipment.)
“I say that because the funding for academic research is really under discussion now in Washington,” he said, referring to proposed policies like the cuts to NIH research grants. “It is not so easy for university investigators to see their way clear to adding additional expensive instrumentation to their research programs.”
Eikon is also preparing to move in April across the San Francisco Bay from Hayward to Millbrae, CA. That’ll be a bit harder than for most biotechs, given the heavy and sensitive lab equipment that Eikon has built.
“We’re gritting our teeth a bit,” Perlmutter said on the move. “These are all bespoke instruments that we have. We can’t just call up Mayflower and ask them to move. We actually have to pack them up ourselves and move them.”