Velaris Therapeutics, the ninth company created from Paragon Labs assets, is now public. Alaunos Therapeutics, which abandoned its cell therapy programs in 2023 and twice risked losing its Nasdaq listing, acquired Velaris in a stock for stock deal that functions as a reverse merger: the private company’s pipeline takes over the public shell, and four of the five board seats will be held by or chosen by Fairmount Funds, the firm that founded Paragon in 2021.
The financing is the substance of the deal. A concurrent private placement of Series C convertible preferred stock, led by Fairmount with Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, Wellington Management, Janus Henderson, Perceptive Advisors, accounts advised by T. Rowe Price and others, raised gross proceeds of about $350 million. The company expects that to fund operations into 2029, through proof of concept data for two programs and initial regulatory filings for two more.
Velaris works on pulmonary arterial hypertension and related cardiopulmonary disease. Its lead candidate, VLR199, is an ActRIIA-Fc ligand trap designed to reproduce the pharmacology of Merck’s Winrevair, the only approved activin signaling inhibitor in PAH, where Velaris argues the profile is not fully optimized. Behind it sit VLR247 and VLR258, ligand traps engineered to spare BMP-9 and BMP-10, which have been linked to blood related side effects, and VLR360, an anti PDGF-B antibody aimed at a complementary pathway. The combined company also intends to keep Alaunos’s obesity and metabolic program.
BioPharma Dive counts more than two dozen biotech reverse mergers announced this year against ten in all of 2025, roughly matching the year’s IPO total. If Mentari Therapeutics closes its own deal by year end, eight of Paragon’s nine disclosed spinouts will have reached public markets this way. The exception, Apogee Therapeutics, went public in a 2023 IPO and was sold to AbbVie in a deal of nearly $11 billion that closed last month.