What are the top cell therapy startups by revenue today?

The ranking of top startups in the cell therapy market by revenue

Below is a table ranking all the companies in this market by their current revenue scale. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the Cell Therapy Market.

What actually counts as a cell therapy startup today?

For this ranking, a cell therapy startup means a startup-origin or specialist biotech built substantially around cell therapy, even if it has since gone public.

A strict private-company definition would make the ranking much less useful. By the time a cell therapy company reaches meaningful commercial revenue, it has often spent years in clinical development, raised several large financing rounds, listed on a stock exchange, partnered with a pharmaceutical group or been acquired.

That is why companies such as Legend Biotech, Iovance Biotherapeutics, Mesoblast, Autolus Therapeutics, JW Therapeutics, CARsgen Therapeutics and Abeona Therapeutics remain relevant here.

Johnson & Johnson, Gilead Sciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novartis and Vertex are different. Their cell therapies matter enormously when we want to understand the size of the market, but these companies are large pharmaceutical businesses rather than cell therapy startups.

The distinction changes the answer completely.

Which cell therapy startups make the most revenue today?

Legend Biotech is by far the largest startup-origin cell therapy specialist we found, with about $1.03 billion of 2025 company revenue.

Iovance follows with $220 million of Amtagvi revenue. Mesoblast generated $115.2 million from Ryoncil in its latest fiscal year, while Autolus reached $71.9 million from AUCATZYL during the first half of 2026 alone.

Below those companies, the market becomes more fragmented. JW Therapeutics generated RMB219 million from Carteyva in 2025. CARsgen reported roughly RMB126 million of company revenue, mainly related to commercialization of zevor-cel. Abeona reached $20.1 million of ZEVASKYN revenue during the first half of 2026.

The numbers are not perfectly comparable because companies recognize their economics differently. Still, they give us a much clearer picture of who has actually built a commercial cell therapy business.

Company	Best current revenue evidence	Metric	Main cell therapy
Legend Biotech	$1.03B	FY2025 company revenue	CARVYKTI
Iovance Biotherapeutics	$220M	FY2025 product revenue	Amtagvi
Mesoblast	$115M	FY2026 product revenue	Ryoncil
Autolus Therapeutics	$71.9M	H1 2026 product revenue	AUCATZYL
JW Therapeutics	RMB219M	FY2025 product revenue	Carteyva
Abeona Therapeutics	$20.1M	H1 2026 product revenue	ZEVASKYN
CARsgen Therapeutics	RMB126M	FY2025 company revenue	zevor-cel
ImmunoACT	₹67.6 crore	FY2025 company revenue	NexCAR19

Why is Legend Biotech so far ahead of other cell therapy startups?

Legend Biotech has pulled away because CARVYKTI has already become a blockbuster-sized product.

Legend reported about $1.029 billion of revenue in 2025, up from $627 million a year earlier. Roughly $945 million came from collaboration revenue, with the rest mainly coming from license and other revenue.

CARVYKTI itself generated approximately $1.9 billion in worldwide net trade sales during 2025. The product also passed 10,000 patients treated worldwide, according to Legend's full-year results.

The gap is large whichever comparison we use. Legend's company revenue was more than four times Amtagvi's $220 million of 2025 revenue and almost nine times Ryoncil's $115.2 million latest annual product revenue.

More recent CARVYKTI sales also show that the franchise remains large rather than simply reflecting one unusually strong historical year. For now, no other startup-origin specialist sits in the same revenue bracket.

Is Legend Biotech's $1 billion revenue the same thing as $1 billion of CARVYKTI sales?

No. Legend Biotech's $1.03 billion is company revenue, while CARVYKTI's roughly $1.9 billion represents worldwide product sales booked through the Johnson & Johnson partnership.

This is one of the most important details in the ranking.

Johnson & Johnson leads global commercialization of CARVYKTI and records product sales. Legend recognizes its share of the economics mainly through collaboration revenue. In 2025, collaboration revenue accounted for roughly $945 million of Legend's $1.029 billion total.

CASGEVY works similarly. Vertex leads commercialization and records product revenue, while CRISPR Therapeutics participates through a 40% share of program economics.

So we cannot take all sales generated by a therapy and assign them to the startup that helped develop it. We rank the revenue actually recognized by each company and separately use product sales when we want to measure the size of the therapy itself.

Legend still comes out comfortably first among specialist companies. The accounting is a bit messy, but ignoring it would make the comparison worse.

Is Iovance the biggest cell therapy startup selling its own product directly?

Iovance has the largest clean direct-product revenue figure among the younger independent cell therapy specialists behind Legend.

Amtagvi generated about $220 million in U.S. revenue during 2025, its first full calendar year on the market. A year earlier, Amtagvi revenue had been approximately $104 million.

Iovance also sold roughly $44 million of Proleukin in 2025, taking total company product revenue to around $264 million. We leave Proleukin out of the cell therapy comparison because it is a supportive biologic rather than the living-cell product itself.

That gives Iovance a particularly easy number to interpret. Hospitals are buying and administering Amtagvi, and Iovance is recognizing the resulting product revenue directly.

Among specialist companies, that puts Iovance well ahead of Mesoblast and Autolus in absolute product sales today.

How big has Mesoblast's Ryoncil business become?

Mesoblast has already turned Ryoncil into a $115 million annual product in its first full commercial year.

Ryoncil generated $115.2 million of net revenue during Mesoblast's fiscal year ended June 2026. Total company revenue reached $120.3 million, compared with only $17.2 million during the previous year.

The second half was especially important. Mesoblast reported $66.5 million of Ryoncil revenue during those six months, including $36 million in the final quarter.

The business was still accelerating into year-end, rather than depending on one unusually large early quarter.

Mesoblast also gives the ranking some useful diversity. Ryoncil is an allogeneic mesenchymal stromal cell therapy, so a nine-figure commercial cell therapy business now exists outside the CAR-T category.

Is Autolus becoming a $100 million cell therapy company?

Yes, Autolus is now operating at a pace consistent with a $100 million-plus annual cell therapy business.

AUCATZYL generated $26.2 million in the first quarter of 2026 and $45.7 million in the second. First-half product revenue therefore reached $71.9 million.

The second quarter was about 74% larger than the first. Autolus subsequently increased its full-year 2026 product-revenue guidance to $140–150 million.

We do not count that guidance as recognized revenue. The more useful fact is that $71.9 million has already been booked in six months, with the latest quarter reaching $45.7 million on its own.

Autolus has moved much closer to the Mesoblast tier than an annual ranking based on last year's numbers would suggest.

Which Asian cell therapy startups are already making serious revenue?

JW Therapeutics is one of the clearest Asian examples, with Carteyva product revenue reaching RMB219 million in 2025.

Carteyva sales grew 38.4% from the previous year. JW's total revenue reached RMB283.7 million after including RMB64.5 million of licensing income, but the RMB219 million product figure gives us the cleaner cell therapy comparison.

CARsgen is another meaningful commercial company. It reported approximately RMB126 million of 2025 revenue, driven mainly by commercialization of zevor-cel.

Fosun Kairos appears larger at the product level, although disclosure is less precise: Fosun Pharma's reporting places Yikaida in a broad RMB500 million to RMB1 billion annual sales band.

India now has a commercial CAR-T company too. ImmunoACT has generated meaningful revenue around NexCAR19, although its latest available company figure is older and comes through Indian corporate-filing data rather than the kind of detailed quarterly product reporting we get from U.S.-listed companies.

Several other Chinese cell therapy developers already have approved therapies, but public standalone revenue remains too limited to give them a precise position.

Company	Market	Commercial evidence	Product
Fosun Kairos	China	RMB500M–RMB1B reported product-sales band	Yikaida
JW Therapeutics	China	RMB219M product revenue	Carteyva
CARsgen Therapeutics	China	RMB126M company revenue	zevor-cel
ImmunoACT	India	₹67.6 crore FY revenue	NexCAR19
IASO Biotherapeutics	China	Commercial product; standalone revenue undisclosed	Fucaso
Juventas Cell Therapy	China	Commercial use; revenue undisclosed	CNCT19
Hengrun Dasheng	China	Approved product; revenue undisclosed	Hengkailai

Should Vericel rank with the cell therapy startups?

Vericel is commercially larger than most companies here, but we treat it as a benchmark rather than a modern cell therapy startup.

Vericel generated $276.3 million of total revenue in 2025. MACI contributed $239.5 million and Epicel added $32.1 million, while the remaining $4.7 million came from NexoBrid, which is not a cell therapy.

That means Vericel produced roughly $272 million from relevant cell-based products, comfortably above Iovance's $220 million Amtagvi figure.

Vericel, however, has been operating in various forms for decades and has already become an established profitable commercial company. Calling it a startup today would blur the line too far.

Its numbers remain useful because they show that cell therapy businesses outside CAR-T can reach hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales.

How much revenue do the biggest cell therapies inside pharma companies make?

The largest cell therapy products are already billion-dollar franchises, with CARVYKTI, Yescarta and Breyanzi far ahead of most specialist companies.

Johnson & Johnson reported approximately $1.887 billion of CARVYKTI sales in 2025.

Gilead reported $1.5 billion for Yescarta and $344 million for Tecartus. Bristol Myers Squibb reported roughly $1.4 billion for Breyanzi and $427 million for Abecma. Novartis remains another large commercial CAR-T player through Kymriah.

Those products show how large the market can become after a therapy moves beyond the specialist biotech that originally developed it.

They also give us a useful ceiling. A startup making $50 million or $100 million from a newly launched cell therapy may still look small beside big pharma, but the leading products show that individual cell therapies can eventually reach billion-dollar annual sales.

Company	Cell therapy	2025 sales
Johnson & Johnson	CARVYKTI	~$1.89B
Gilead Sciences	Yescarta	$1.50B
Bristol Myers Squibb	Breyanzi	~$1.4B
Bristol Myers Squibb	Abecma	$427M
Gilead Sciences	Tecartus	$344M
Vericel	MACI	$240M

Is CAR-T still where most cell therapy revenue comes from?

Yes. CAR-T still dominates the top of the cell therapy revenue table by a wide margin.

CARVYKTI, Yescarta, Breyanzi, Abecma and Tecartus collectively produce several billion dollars of annual sales. The startup ranking tells a similar story: Legend, Autolus, JW Therapeutics, CARsgen and several other commercial specialists are heavily exposed to CAR-T.

But the lower half of the ranking is becoming more varied.

Iovance's Amtagvi is a tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy. Mesoblast sells an allogeneic mesenchymal stromal cell therapy. Vericel generates hundreds of millions from cultured-cell products. Abeona has begun selling an autologous gene-modified skin-cell therapy.

CAR-T still controls most of the very large revenue lines. The rest of cell therapy is finally starting to produce businesses large enough to sit meaningfully beside it.

Are gene-edited cell therapies finally generating real revenue?

Yes. CASGEVY has pushed gene-edited cell therapy firmly into commercial revenue rather than leaving the category at the clinical-development stage.

Vertex recorded $76 million of CASGEVY revenue in the second quarter of 2026, up 78% from the previous quarter. First-quarter revenue had been $43 million, which puts first-half sales at roughly $119 million.

CASGEVY is especially important because the therapy uses a patient's own hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells edited with CRISPR/Cas9.

Abeona provides a smaller but similarly concrete example from gene-modified cell therapy. ZEVASKYN produced $20.1 million in product revenue during the first half of 2026 after recording its first commercial sale near the end of 2025.

These are still much smaller businesses than the largest CAR-T franchises, but the commercial question has changed. We now have actual revenue curves to study.

How many cell therapy specialists have crossed $20 million of commercial revenue?

The $20 million threshold now includes a real group of specialist companies rather than one or two exceptional CAR-T businesses.

Legend, Iovance, Mesoblast and Autolus are comfortably beyond it. JW Therapeutics also clears the threshold once its RMB219 million of Carteyva sales is converted into dollars. Abeona reached $20.1 million in only the first six months of 2026.

Older specialists such as Vericel, JCR Pharmaceuticals and several Korean regenerative-medicine companies add to the commercial base if we broaden the definition beyond startups.

That creates a genuine middle tier between billion-dollar cell therapy franchises and pre-revenue clinical developers.

A few years ago, the revenue distribution was much more binary: huge products owned by pharma groups at the top and a long list of developers with little commercial revenue underneath. There is much more happening in between now.

Which cell therapy revenue numbers need the most caution?

Collaboration revenue, segment revenue and old standalone figures deserve the most caution because they can make different companies look more comparable than they really are.

Legend's revenue is the obvious example. The number is large and fully legitimate, but most of it comes through the Johnson & Johnson collaboration rather than direct product sales booked by Legend.

Arcellx historically reported collaboration revenue from Kite rather than revenue from a commercially sold therapy. Immatics also recognizes collaboration revenue while its own engineered T-cell programs remain in development.

Other companies create different problems. MEDIPOST reports revenue for a stem-cell therapy business segment, which is broader than one product. Dendreon's standalone perimeter is harder to isolate cleanly from parent-company reporting. bluebird bio's last strong independent revenue figure predates its acquisition.

We still use these datapoints when they tell us something important. We just do not pretend every top-line number means the same thing.

Which cell therapy companies look bigger because their revenue data is getting old?

bluebird bio is the clearest example of why an older revenue number can become misleading in a fast-moving ranking.

bluebird reported $83.8 million of product revenue for 2024. That number would still place it relatively high beside several newer commercial companies if we sorted the table mechanically.

But bluebird was subsequently taken private, while Mesoblast, Autolus and Abeona have since produced much fresher commercial evidence.

Dendreon creates a similar issue. PROVENGE remains a meaningful commercial therapy, yet current standalone reporting is less clean than the revenue disclosures available from companies such as Iovance or Mesoblast.

Historical revenue still tells us that these businesses reached scale. It carries less weight when we are trying to answer who is largest now.

Are private cell therapy startups close to the revenue leaders?

Most private cell therapy startups are still nowhere near the commercial revenue leaders.

The industry itself explains why. Cell therapies usually require long clinical programs, specialized manufacturing, regulatory approval, treatment-center onboarding, reimbursement agreements and complex patient logistics before meaningful revenue arrives.

Companies that successfully survive that process often stop looking like classic startups along the way. They go public, sign large pharmaceutical partnerships or get acquired.

This is why the top of the revenue ranking is dominated by listed specialist biotechs and products owned by major pharma groups.

Private cell therapy companies remain extremely important scientifically. Their importance just shows up more often in pipeline quality, clinical data and financing than in current revenue.

Does a huge funding round tell us anything about cell therapy revenue?

A huge funding round can tell us that investors see potential, but it gives us almost no direct information about current cell therapy revenue.

BrainChild Bio, for example, raised a $116 million Series A while developing CAR-T programs. That is a meaningful financing event for an early company, yet it tells us nothing about commercial product sales.

The same caution applies to acquisition payments, public-equity raises and regulatory milestone payments. These are sources of capital rather than customer revenue.

This distinction is especially useful in cell therapy because development costs can be enormous. A company may have hundreds of millions of dollars on its balance sheet while producing no product revenue at all.

For this ranking, funding only helps us identify companies worth investigating. It never becomes a substitute for commercial scale.

How concentrated is cell therapy startup revenue today?

Cell therapy startup revenue is still extremely concentrated, with Legend sitting far above a relatively small group of commercial specialists.

Legend's roughly $1.03 billion of company revenue is followed by a steep drop to Iovance's $220 million of Amtagvi sales.

The next step down brings us to Mesoblast at $115.2 million, then Autolus at $71.9 million for the first half of 2026. After that, many specialists sit in the tens of millions of dollars or local-currency equivalents.

The shape of the market looks more like a cliff than a smooth ranking.

One startup-origin specialist has already reached the billion-dollar level. A few more have built substantial commercial businesses. Most of the sector is still much smaller or has yet to record meaningful product revenue.

Which cell therapy companies are growing fastest right now?

Autolus, Mesoblast and Abeona show some of the clearest recent launch acceleration among the specialist companies we reviewed.

Autolus increased AUCATZYL revenue from $26.2 million in the first quarter of 2026 to $45.7 million in the second.

Mesoblast generated $66.5 million of Ryoncil revenue in the second half of its fiscal year after finishing the full year at $115.2 million.

Abeona went from essentially no ZEVASKYN commercial history to $20.1 million of first-half 2026 product revenue.

Iovance is already larger: Amtagvi increased from about $104 million during its 2024 launch year to $220 million in 2025.

Meanwhile, maturity is showing up elsewhere. Gilead's total cell therapy sales fell 7% in 2025, with Yescarta down 5% and Tecartus down 15%. New launches are climbing quickly while some older CAR-T franchises face much tougher competition.

Which type of cell therapy has produced the strongest startup businesses so far?

Autologous oncology cell therapy has produced the biggest startup-origin businesses so far, led by CAR-T and followed by Iovance's TIL platform.

Legend's commercial economics come from CARVYKTI. Autolus sells AUCATZYL. JW Therapeutics sells Carteyva. CARsgen commercializes zevor-cel. Fosun Kairos has Yikaida.

Iovance broadens that oncology picture with Amtagvi, a tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte therapy that generated $220 million in 2025.

Outside oncology, Mesoblast is now the most interesting counterexample in the younger specialist group. Ryoncil's $115.2 million first-year revenue shows that allogeneic stromal-cell therapies can build a sizeable commercial business too.

Abeona adds another route through genetically modified skin cells.

Oncology still dominates the money at the top, but the commercial base underneath it is getting much less uniform.

Which important cell therapy companies still cannot be ranked properly by revenue?

Several important cell therapy companies remain impossible to rank precisely because their product economics are undisclosed, shared with a partner or still effectively pre-revenue.

CRISPR Therapeutics is the most obvious example. CASGEVY generated $76 million in the second quarter of 2026, but Vertex leads commercialization and records those product sales. CRISPR participates through a 40% share of program costs and profits, so simply copying Vertex's sales into a CRISPR revenue ranking would be misleading.

Rocket Pharmaceuticals also has an approved product, KRESLADI, but the company's latest reporting said it had not yet generated product-sales revenue and that commercial onboarding was still beginning.

BlueRock Therapeutics has advanced bemdaneprocel deep into development but does not publish standalone revenue as a Bayer-owned company.

Other companies such as DiscGenics, IASO Biotherapeutics, Juventas and several Chinese commercial developers either remain pre-revenue or do not disclose enough standalone financial information.

Leaving these companies unranked is more accurate than inventing a number from funding, patient counts or partner sales.

So who are the top cell therapy startups by revenue today?

Legend Biotech is the clear revenue leader among startup-origin cell therapy specialists, followed by a much smaller group led by Iovance, Mesoblast and Autolus.

Legend reported about $1.03 billion of 2025 company revenue, mainly through its CARVYKTI collaboration. Iovance generated $220 million directly from Amtagvi. Mesoblast reached $115.2 million with Ryoncil in its latest fiscal year. Autolus has already generated $71.9 million from AUCATZYL during the first half of 2026.

JW Therapeutics, CARsgen, Abeona and a group of Asian commercial specialists form the next tier.

Big pharma sits above much of this ranking at the product level. CARVYKTI generated about $1.89 billion for Johnson & Johnson in 2025, Yescarta generated $1.5 billion for Gilead and Breyanzi generated roughly $1.4 billion for Bristol Myers Squibb.

Those figures show where the commercial ceiling currently sits. Among companies that still make sense to describe as startup-origin cell therapy specialists, Legend remains in a category of its own.