AnaCardio raises €62.5M Series B for oral heart failure drug
Stockholm's AnaCardio raised a €62.5M Series B co-led by Novo Holdings and the Ljungström family office, carrying its oral heart failure drug AC01 through a 400-patient Phase 2b to Phase 3 readiness.
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Stockholm, Sweden
AnaCardio, a Stockholm clinical-stage biopharma built on Karolinska Institutet research, has raised a €62.5M Series B co-led by Novo Holdings and the Ljungström family office to take AC01, its oral heart failure drug, through a 400-patient Phase 2b and to Phase 3 readiness by 2028.
European cardiology has a familiar sore spot: we publish the science, and the late-stage trials – and the returns – too often migrate west with the money that funds them. This week the counterexample is Swedish. A €62.5M Series B closed in Stockholm with European capital on both lead lines, one of them a family office. Below, I lay out the round, the science of a hunger hormone pointed at the heart, and the pattern Novo Holdings drew across the Nordics in 48 hours.
A cheque sized to finish the job
AnaCardio announced the round on 30 September 2026. Novo Holdings and the Ljungström family office co-led; Innovestor Life Science joined as a new investor, alongside existing backers Helsinn, Pureos Bioventures, Sound Bioventures, Industrifonden, Flerie and LLD Nybohov Invest.
The financing “will fully fund the advancement of AnaCardio’s lead candidate, AC01, through Phase 2b clinical development in patients with chronic advanced heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), with the aim of establishing a Phase 3-ready asset by 2028”, per the announcement. “This €62.5 million Series B, co-led by Novo Holdings and the Ljungström family office, fully funds GOAL-HF2, AC01’s 400 patient Phase 2b trial across 12 countries,” said CEO Patrik Strömberg. Enrolment is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Note what is not in that structure: no tranches, no milestone gates between the company and its data. The round is sized to carry one asset through one decisive study. That is still rarer in Europe than it should be.
A hunger hormone pointed at a failing heart
AnaCardio develops oral therapies for heart failure from research out of Karolinska Institutet. AC01, its lead candidate, is a first-in-class oral ghrelin receptor agonist: it borrows the receptor biology of the hormone that makes you hungry to help the heart muscle contract more efficiently, sensitising cardiac cells to the calcium already there rather than flooding them with more. The distinction matters because traditional inotropes – the drugs that force a weak heart to pump harder – have long been limited by their safety profile.
“Improving cardiac contractility safely remains a major unmet need in heart failure. AC01 is the first oral agent we have seen with the potential to overcome the safety limitations of traditional inotropes,” said Jørgen Søberg Petersen, Senior Partner at Novo Holdings, in the announcement.
In GOAL-HF1, the completed Phase 1b/2a study, the company reports AC01 increased cardiac output by 22% and improved ejection fraction by 4.8 percentage points at day 28. The population it targets is stark: roughly one third of HFrEF patients do not respond adequately to standard therapy, and two-year mortality in advanced disease reaches 50%, per the announcement. Helsinn, the Swiss group AC01 originated from, remains on the cap table.
An $8.56bn drug market compounding at 13%
The market AC01 is aimed at is no niche. Congestive heart failure drugs are an $8.56bn global market in 2026, forecast to reach $15.88bn by 2031, a 13.16% CAGR (Mordor Intelligence, September 2026), with Europe the second-largest region. For a drug class, that is unusually fast growth, and it is driven by exactly the gap AnaCardio targets: patients who have run out of road on the standard arsenal.
The round also lands in good company in our fundraising data. In the same week of European biotech, Copenhagen’s Breye Therapeutics raised a €67.5M Series A co-led by Novo Holdings and Mission BioCapital, and Milan’s Aptadir pulled a €40M seed for gene-reactivating RNA therapeutics. Clinical-stage cheques of this size used to be the signal to book a flight to Boston.
Novo Holdings’ second Nordic co-lead in 48 hours
Here is the pattern worth watching. On 29 September, Novo Holdings co-led Breye Therapeutics’ €67.5M Series A in Copenhagen; a day later it co-led AnaCardio’s €62.5M Series B in Stockholm. Two clinical-stage Nordic companies, two rounds above €60M, one European evergreen investor writing lead cheques at home, two days apart. So who said Europe cannot fund its own clinical risk?
The other signal is the Ljungström family office on the lead line. The money European biotech usually waits for – family capital, pension funds, insurers – tends to watch from the sidelines until a US crossover fund sets the price. The good news is that here, private Swedish wealth priced a Swedish Series B alongside a specialist investor, and the syndicate stayed European from Helsinn to Industrifonden. What we are watching next: GOAL-HF2’s enrolment curve through 2027, and whether the Phase 3 cheque, when it comes, is signed in Europe too.
Heart failure patients do not need another conference panel on European competitiveness; they need a 400-patient trial to read out. Stockholm just funded one. Watch it.
