In May 2026, a company built in Copenhagen rang the opening bell on Nasdaq in New York. Hemab Therapeutics, a rare-bleeding-disorder specialist grown from an asset Novo Nordisk had set aside, priced its initial public offering (IPO) at $18 a share and raised $346.7m. Novo Holdings, its sole seed investor, had backed the company from the start and stayed an active investor all the way to the float. By mid-June the stock traded above $26, a market value of roughly $1.2bn. A European success, banked six thousand kilometres from home.
Søren Møller has watched that pattern repeat for fifteen years, and his diagnosis is exact. “We have all the right ingredients to win in biotech,” says the managing partner of Novo Holdings’ Seed Investments team. “All we need is capital.”
Novo Holdings, the investment company that manages the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s assets and owns about 28 per cent of the shares of Novo Nordisk and 77.3 per cent of the votes, has backed the building of more than thirty biotech companies that have together raised over DKK20bn. The science is there and the companies get built. Keeping them, and the value they create, in Europe is the problem.