Big Picture Bio, a London-based BioTech startup developing AI-designed combination therapies for cancer and other complex diseases, has emerged from stealth with a combined funding round of €2.55 million (£2.2 million).
The funding comprises a €1.75 million (£1.5 million) pre-Seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, alongside €815k (£700k) in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships Programme. Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White also participated in the pre-Seed round.
“I had the privilege of working closely with Kerstin and Mark at the very beginning of Deep Science Ventures, and saw first-hand the determination, conviction and sheer resolve they bring to building ambitious, scalable businesses,” said Remy Kesrouani, Managing Partner, Kadmos Capital.
He added, “Big Picture Bio is the culmination of that journey, applying a genuinely differentiated approach to AI to one of drug development’s hardest problems: predicting how complex clinical trials will actually behave.”
Founded by CEO Dr. Kerstin Papenfuss and CTO Dr. Mark Hammond, Big Picture Bio has built a generative “world model” that simulates how tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue interact, with the aim of identifying which drug combinations, and in what sequence, are most likely to hold off cancer resistance.
Before spinning out Big Picture Bio, both founders spent years at Deep Science Ventures. Papenfuss built and led DSV’s therapeutics team, founding 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies during her time there, and previously held roles at LifeArc and the Cell & Gene Therapy Catapult.
Hammond co-founded DSV and took it “from €174k to a €1.16 billion+ portfolio”, led its engineering work on agentic scientific discovery, and was previously involved in licensing and investment at Imperial College, whose spin-outs during his tenure included Hinge Health, Hark, and Monolith.
The pair have worked together for seven years, building companies that tackle complex, evolving diseases across the DSV portfolio. With Big Picture Bio, they argue that a full pairwise screen of just 100 drugs at 100 doses would require roughly 50 million lab experiments, a scale no physical screen can reach, but its models can search computationally in seconds.
The company says its predictive approach has already been tested against real clinical data, including correctly forecasting the failure of Regeneron’s fianlimab trial, and posting 14 predictions ahead of the 2026 ASCO oncology conference, of which 12 proved accurate.
“Cancer is not one disease driven by one target, but we still develop drugs as if it were. Combinations are how we beat it – and with more than 900 billion of them possible, no lab on earth can test its way to the right ones,” said Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, CEO and co-founder, Big Picture Bio.
She added, “That is the problem we built Big Picture Bio to solve: model the disease as the dynamic system it actually is, then design against it – combinations chosen because they are most likely to work in patients, not because they were the ones we could get to. This funding takes our first designed combinations out of the model and into the lab.”
Big Picture Bio’s advisory team also draws on senior pharma expertise, including Dr Laura Rosenberg (Director of Target Validation at AstraZeneca), Dr Duncan Young (Head of Search and Evaluation, Oncology Business Development & Licensing at AstraZeneca), Dr Garry Pairaudeau (former CTO of Exscientia and CEO of DaltonTx), and Dr Christian Dillon (Chief Scientific Officer at PhoreMost).
Big Picture Bio will use the funding to take its AI-designed cancer combination therapies from computer models into the wet lab. The firm will initially focus on cancer and immune-mediated diseases but aims to move beyond trial-and-error combination testing altogether, eventually designing new treatments from scratch rather than only recombining existing drugs.
