Psychedelic Company Financing Tracker

Here, we share several charts and visualisations of our in-house data to provide an overview of the volume and characteristics of investment in the psychedelics sector. Last update: Q3 2024. ∎

Quarterly Fundraising Activity in Psychedelics

A chill on fundraising activity that began in 2022 persisted through the end of the 2023 calendar year. Over 40% of 2023’s aggregate financing dollars can be attributed to a private placement by Compass Pathways, which brought in $125m1.

The 2024 calendar year, however, got off to a roaring start with a small crop of substantial rounds in Q1.

Lykos Therapeutics (formerly MAPS PBC) kicked off the year by announcing a $100m+ Series A (see MAPS PBC Closes $100m Series A, Rebrands to Lykos Therapeutics). That momentum continued as both Cybin and MindMed raised substantial sums via public offerings on the back of FDA Breakthrough Therapy Designation announcements (see Cybin Scores Breakthrough Therapy Designation for Deuterated Psilocybin Analog in MDD…; FDA Hands MindMed’s LSD Candidate Breakthrough Therapy Designation in Generalised Anxiety Disorder).

While valuations were markedly more modest than those seen a few years ago, the advent of these substantial rounds has been seen as a welcome signal for investors and operators alike.

The momentum from Q1 2024 was not quite sustained in Q2, however, with aggregate investment dropping to just over $175m. That’s nothing to be sniffed at, however, as the last time we saw a quarter with this level of investment—aside from Q1—was Q4 2022.

Q2 2024 included several notable rounds, such as Reunion Neuroscience’s $103m Series A (see Reunion Neuroscience Gets a New Lease of Life with $103M Series A to Fund Phase 2 Studies of 4-HO-DiPT Prodrug, but also Tempering Excitement Around Recent Raises); Gilgamesh’s deal with AbbVie which included a $65m cash injection (see Breaking: AbbVie Inks Deal with Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals); and Psylo’s first close on a seed round (see Mini Interview: Joshua Ismin, Psylo).

Q3 saw a further chill on new investment, however. Read our analysis.

Private Psychedelics Company Investment Rounds

Looking only at investments in private companies and disaggregating this data by round, we see a total lack of Series B or C financings in 2023, at least in terms of announced financing events. That trend has continued through H1 2024.

Sources & Uses (2017 - Q1 2024)

Using a Sankey chart we can visualise, broadly2, the sources and uses of capital inflows.

The vast majority of capital inflows to the psychedelics field has accrued to drug discovery and development companies. This should be unsurprising, given the fact that drug development is very capital intensive and the relatively nascent nature of the medical psychedelics industry.

We also see a relatively even split between VC and public financing, in aggregate, though public companies have attracted a larger share of dollars in recent years.

Public Psychedelics Companies by Marketcap

The basket of around thirty-five publicly-traded psychedelics companies is dominated, in terms of marketcap, by a handful of companies: Compass Pathways, atai Life Sciences, GH Research, MindMed and Cybin.

We gain a further sense of perspective by comparing the aggregate marketcap of these public psychedelics companies to that of mid-cap, large-cap and mega-cap pharmaceutical companies like Sage3, Otsuka and Pfizer, respectively.

Are you looking for more information, data or insights on psychedelic investments? Learn more about our Advisory, Consultancy and Incubation offerings or get in touch.

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  1. An additional $160m is tied to the exercise of warrants and as such is not recorded in our tracker until such warrants are exercised.
  2. We classify each investment or round as either VC (i.e., investment into a private company) or investment into a public company. We assign each recipient company a position on the psychedelics value chain. Where companies straddle multiple value chain segments, we assign the segment that the company is most substantially engaged in.
  3. Since we set these comps in 2022, Sage has technically fallen out of mid-cap territory after its marketcap dropped below $2bn in 2023. We include it here for comparison’s sake (we included it in a 2022 visualisation).