Another Versant Ventures startup announced a big funding round this week, and this one wants to move quickly.
Santa Ana Bio said Thursday that it closed a $125 million Series B, bringing its total financing to $168 million after its Series A last year. The company is building a precision immunology pipeline and has three pipeline programs, two of which are set to enter the clinic by the end of next year.
The lead program is a drug called SAB01 that targets c-Kit on mast cells. Peter Emtage, Santa Ana’s CEO and a venture partner at Versant, said it will be tested first in chronic inducible urticaria, a visible skin condition. He noted that it’s among the fastest to produce clinical data.
“For us, speed is everything,” Emtage told Endpoints News. “Being able to go into an indication where we could put the drug on board, deplete mast cells, and then come back and use a specific stimulus to determine that we had, is pretty much the quickest readout that we could get.”
Emtage added that the plan is to expand SAB01 into pediatric indications in the future. The compound is designed to avoid off-target toxicity in the periphery.
In addition to SAB01, Santa Ana’s other two programs are SAB03 and SAB05. The former utilizes multiple mechanisms of action, according to Versant managing director and Santa Ana board member Jerel Davis, including PD-1 agonism and suppression of T cell function. Santa Ana is aiming to launch a study for SAB03 in rheumatoid arthritis by the end of 2025.
“It’s a PD-1 agonist, but rather than a PD-1 agonist-plus, it’s a plus-plus,” Davis said. “There’s at least two other mechanisms that have been added on to this that we think will take that beyond and above the other Phase 1 assets out there that are showing clinical efficacy.”
SAB05 is a little further behind than SAB01 and SAB03. It’s being developed to apply the antibody-drug conjugate approach to steroids, with the goal of delivering a localized anti-inflammatory treatment instead of steroids, which are administered systemically. The timeline for SAB05 reaching the clinic is still being worked out, Emtage said.
The funding is expected to get Santa Ana into early 2027 and get the first two programs through Phase 1 testing. After that, the company plans to evaluate the best path forward for additional cash, which could include an IPO. But that decision will come down to what the landscape looks like.
“We’ll make the best decision based on the company sometime in 2026, depending on data flow and interest from partners and the status of the window for an IPO,” Emtage said.
GV led the Series B round after Versant led last year’s Series A. The raise comes a few days after Bright Peak Therapeutics, launched out of Versant’s Ridgeline Therapeutics Discovery Engine in 2020, closed a $90 million Series C.