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The Psychedelic Money Rankings: $11 Billion Public, $1.6 Billion Private, $140 Million From Governments
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The Psychedelic Money Rankings: $11 Billion Public, $1.6 Billion Private, $140 Million From Governments

Nathan Richardson • Sep 11, 2026

We tracked every public company, private funding round, and government dollar we could verify in the psychedelic-therapeutics sector. Part one is the rankings. Part two, next Friday, is the trends, the mergers, and the graveyard.

Three kinds of money are moving into psychedelic medicine at once — public markets, private venture capital, and government research budgets — and they're moving at wildly different scales. We spent the past week tracking down every figure we could actually verify across all three, correcting several along the way (more on that below), and ranking what's left. This is part one: the rankings themselves. Part two, next Friday, goes deeper into the trends underneath them — the mergers, the renames, and the sizable graveyard of companies that didn't make it.

The headline number is the gap. Public companies in this sector carry a combined market cap north of $11 billion. Private companies have disclosed over $1.6 billion in funding. Verified government funding, added up across every country we could find real figures for, comes to roughly $140 million — less than 1% of what's moving through public markets alone. Governments talk about psychedelics a lot right now. They're not paying for much of it.

Public Companies

Ranked by market capitalization, close of Sept 8–9, 2026.

CompanyTickerMarket CapNote
Definium Therapeutics (fka MindMed)Nasdaq: DFTX$5.14BUp 645% YoY on four Phase 3 readouts for LSD compound DT120
AtaiBeckleyNasdaq: ATAI$2.70BBeing acquired by Eli Lilly for up to $3.8B
GH ResearchNasdaq: GHRS~$1.95BBest-funded pure-play; positive Phase 2b for inhaled 5-MeO-DMT
COMPASS PathwaysNasdaq: CMPS$1.94BTwo positive Phase 3 trials, NDA targeted for 2027
Helus Pharma (fka Cybin)Nasdaq: HELP$905M100+ patents granted; psilocybin candidate in Phase 3
Bright Minds BiosciencesNasdaq/CSE: DRUG$656.7MPositive Phase 2 epilepsy data, heading to Phase 3
Entropy Neurodynamics (fka Tryp)ASX: ENP~$45MAcquired via 2024 reverse merger, renamed twice since
Optimi HealthCSE: OPTI$23.1MGMP manufacturer with real revenue; pending Nasdaq uplist
Rhelion Life Sciences (fka Red Light Holland)CSE: RHELC$18.4MMerged with Filament Health, April 2026
Revive TherapeuticsCSE: RVVC$10.9MMulti-platform — psilocybin, cannabis IP, and a COVID drug

Definium's run is the biggest surprise on this list — a company that was trading as a penny-stock afterthought as recently as last year is now the most valuable pure psychedelic company on public markets, on the strength of an LSD compound most people have never heard of. But the bigger story is the Eli Lilly deal: it's the first time a major pharmaceutical company has bought a psychedelic drug developer outright, rather than licensing a compound or taking a minority stake. Below the top six, the list drops off fast — Optimi Health is the clearest "real, small, and actually growing" story in the group, and most of what's below it is single-digit-million-dollar micro-caps, several of them functionally distressed. We'll get into that tail, plus the ones that didn't survive at all, in part two.

Private Companies

Ranked by total disclosed capital raised. Nonprofits and companies that have since gone public or been acquired are flagged separately.

CompanyRaisedNote
Resilient Pharmaceuticals (fka Lykos / MAPS PBC)~$240–290MRecapitalized by Antonio Gracias and Sir Christopher Hohn after 2024 FDA rejection
Beckley Psytech$100–164MMerged into AtaiBeckley, Nov 2025, at ~$390M implied valuation
Usona Institute *$148.2M in assetsNonprofit — donor and grant funded, not VC
Reunion Neuroscience$133MRaised privately after a 2023 take-private; FDA Breakthrough Therapy status, Feb 2026
Terran Biosciences~$113MPatents on new MDMA and psilocybin salts, deals with Sanofi and Pierre Fabre
Delix Therapeutics~$100MPlus an $85M Series C led by Johnson & Johnson — term sheet only, not yet closed
Gilgamesh Pharma$60MRaised fresh after AbbVie bought its lead drug, bretisilocin, for up to $1.2B
Osmind$57MEHR/data platform for psychedelic clinics — not a drug developer
Sensorium Therapeutics$55MNon-classical anxiety compound; Phase 1a data presented Aug 2026
Ajna BioSciences~$28MFunded largely via retail crowdfunding, not traditional VC

*Usona is a 501(c)(3), not a VC-backed company — its figure is total assets from its most recent Form 990, not a funding round, and it's included for scale, not as a like-for-like comparison.

Two stories dominate this list. One is Resilient Pharmaceuticals — recapitalized by two SpaceX-connected billionaires after its 2024 FDA rejection nearly killed it, and now resubmitting its MDMA application without the new Phase 3 trial regulators originally asked for. The other is Gilgamesh, whose story is almost the inverse of everyone else's here: AbbVie didn't invest in Gilgamesh, it bought Gilgamesh's best drug outright for up to $1.2 billion, and what's left is a smaller company raising fresh money to build the next one. That's the second-largest transaction in the entire sector this year, after the Lilly deal above, and it happened with almost no coverage outside trade press.

Government Funding

Ranked by verified dollar amount committed or disbursed. Programs with only single-source or unconfirmed figures are excluded here — see the corrections note below.

ProgramAmountFunds
Texas — SB 2308 / HB 3717$50–100MIbogaine trials for opioid use disorder, PTSD, and TBI
ARPA-H state-matching fund$50M+Matches state psychedelic research investment
Australia MRFF$15M poolPsilocybin and MDMA trials at Monash and Sydney
NIDA → Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals$14MCardiac-safe ibogaine analog for opioid use disorder
NIDA → Harvard / Mass General Brighamup to $11MIbogaine for opioid use disorder
DoD — Walter Reed + Emory$9.8MMDMA-assisted therapy for active-duty PTSD/TBI
Oregon — Measure 109 program$8.7MRegulatory infrastructure for licensed psilocybin services
EU Horizon Europe — PsyPal€6.5MPsilocybin for palliative-care distress, 19-partner consortium
Germany BMBF — EPIsoDE trial~€5MPsilocybin depression trial
NIH/NIDA → Johns Hopkins$4MFirst federally-funded psychedelic-treatment grant in 50+ years

Texas is the whole story here. Its ibogaine initiative is bigger than every other verified government program on this list combined, and it exists specifically because Texas couldn't find a single external drug company willing to partner on it — the state is running its own trials because nobody else would. One number we deliberately left off this table: the Netherlands has a €35 million mental-health research allocation that gets cited in psychedelic coverage, but it's general mental-health funding, not psychedelic-specific, and including it would have overstated the real total. That's the kind of correction we made throughout this project rather than let stand — worth being upfront about.

What We Got Wrong Along the Way

Before publishing, we found and fixed nine claims that didn't hold up: Tryp Therapeutics didn't simply rename itself to Entropy Neurodynamics, it was acquired by Australia's Exopharm and the acquirer renamed itself twice since. Otonomy, sometimes described as a psychedelics pivot, never touched psychedelics at all — it dissolved as a hearing-loss biotech for unrelated reasons. Kentucky's widely-cited $21 million annual ibogaine appropriation was stripped from the bill before it became law. Arizona's cited $5 million ibogaine bill traces to the wrong bill number entirely. We'll walk through the rest, plus the fuller list of mergers, delistings, and outright failures, in part two.

This is business and market reporting, not investment advice. No compound discussed here is FDA-approved for the indications listed, and every company's clinical-stage status is current as of this writing, not a guarantee of future approval.

Sources

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