Glasgow biotech Mironid has raised a €39.9m ($46m) Series B led by the Scottish National Investment Bank, with Roche Venture Fund and Sofinnova Partners among the participants, to push its lead kidney disease candidate towards the clinic.
Mironid is a Glasgow-based drug developer spun out of research at the University of Strathclyde. Its work centres on modulating cyclic AMP signalling, a mechanism it is applying across rare kidney diseases, inflammatory conditions and cancer. The lead programme targets autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD), the most common hereditary kidney disorder.
The Series B was led by the Scottish National Investment Bank, the Scottish government's development bank, with participation from Roche Venture Fund, Epidarex Capital, Sofinnova Partners, BioGeneration Ventures and the University of Strathclyde. The €39.9m round takes total capital raised to roughly €40.8m following an earlier Series A extension.
For the cap table, the syndicate is notable on two counts. A national development bank leading the round places public capital at the centre of the ownership structure, while the presence of Roche Venture Fund, the corporate venture arm of the Swiss pharmaceuticals group, adds a strategic investor with obvious downstream relevance for a company that will eventually need partners to run late-stage trials. Specific ownership and dilution terms were not disclosed.
The clinical rationale is grounded in scale of need. Chief executive Neil Wilkie noted that ADPKD affects more than 12 million people worldwide, with around half of patients developing kidney failure by the age of 60. Mironid's lead candidate is a first-in-class small molecule designed to modulate cAMP signalling to slow the formation and growth of the cysts that drive the disease.
The proceeds will fund advancement of the ADPKD programme from preclinical work into clinical development, the most capital-hungry phase of any drug's life and the point at which valuations and risk both rise sharply.
The deal is also a marker for Scotland's life sciences base. The Scottish National Investment Bank framed the investment as evidence of the country's growing reputation for biotech innovation, and the round stands out as a substantial early-stage life sciences cheque struck outside the traditional London and Cambridge clusters.
The path from here is long and uncertain, as it is for any preclinical asset moving towards first-in-human studies. What Mironid has secured is the balance sheet to get there, backed by a syndicate that combines Scottish public capital with international pharma and specialist life sciences investors.
Original source: EU-Startups — https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/08/glasgow-based-mironid-raises-e39-9-million-in-series-b-to-advance-rare-kidney-disease-treatment/
