Big Picture Bio, a London based biotechnology startup, has emerged from stealth with combined funding of €2.55 million (£2.2 million). The company is developing generative artificial intelligence models to design combination therapies for cancer and other complex diseases. The new financing will help the company move its first computationally designed drug combinations into laboratory validation.
Funding structure and investor support
The pre-seed round totals €1.75 million (£1.5 million) and was co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, with participation from Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White. Big Picture Bio also received €815,000 (£700,000) in non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK through its Investor Partnerships Programme. Together, the €2.55 million package provides resources to advance the company from computational modelling to wet-lab testing.
How the generative world model works
Big Picture Bio has built a generative world model that simulates how tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue interact across different disease sites and patient subgroups. The platform is designed to identify which drug combinations, and in what sequence, are most likely to hold off cancer resistance. The founders note that a full pairwise screen of just 100 drugs at 100 doses would require roughly 50 million lab experiments, while their model can search computationally in seconds.
Evidence from clinical predictions
The company says its predictive approach has been tested against real-world clinical data, including correctly forecasting the failure of Regeneron’s fianlimab trial. Big Picture Bio also posted 14 predictions ahead of the 2026 ASCO oncology conference, of which 12 proved accurate. The team uses this validation to assess whether its models are identifying combinations with meaningful clinical potential rather than positioning prediction as the end product.
Leadership and sector expertise
Big Picture Bio was founded by CEO Dr. Kerstin Papenfuss and CTO Dr. Mark Hammond, who both spent years at Deep Science Ventures. Papenfuss built and led the therapeutics team at Deep Science Ventures and founded 12 therapeutics and enabling technology companies, while Hammond co-founded Deep Science Ventures and led engineering work on agentic scientific discovery. The company’s advisory team includes senior figures from AstraZeneca, DaltonTx and PhoreMost with oncology and drug discovery experience.
Investor confidence
Remy Kesrouani, managing partner at Kadmos Capital, said the founders bring determination and conviction to building scalable businesses. Paolo Pio of Exceptional Ventures added that Big Picture Bio is targeting a central problem in modern oncology by identifying the right combination therapies faster and with greater confidence. Dom Falcao, founder of Deep Science Ventures, noted that the company represents a natural evolution of the methodology used to build advanced therapeutics ventures.
Next steps for the company
Big Picture Bio will initially focus on cancer and immune-mediated diseases, using the new funding to validate its first AI-designed cancer combination therapies in wet-lab experiments. The company aims to move beyond trial-and-error combination testing altogether. In the longer term, it plans to design new treatments from scratch rather than only recombining existing drugs.
Big Picture Bio’s emergence reflects growing interest in applying generative artificial intelligence to complex therapeutic challenges in oncology. Its combination of predictive modelling, clinical validation and experienced leadership positions the company to test a new approach to combination therapy design. The newly announced funding provides a clear pathway to generate laboratory evidence for its first AI-selected drug combinations.