Big Picture Bio leaves stealth with £2.2m, £700k of it non-dilutive
The London biotech split its pre-seed between two co-leads and an Innovate UK programme, keeping roughly a third of the money off the cap table.
Big Picture Bio announced on 18 September that it had come out of stealth with £2.2 million, or €2.55 million, behind it.
The money arrives in two parts. A pre-seed round of £1.5 million (€1.75 million) was co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, with Gloucester Ventures and the angel investor John White also taking part.
The remaining £700k (€815k) is non-dilutive support from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships Programme. That is close to a third of the total raised without equity attached.
The company was founded by Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, chief executive, and Dr Mark Hammond, chief technology officer. Both came out of Deep Science Ventures, where they worked together for seven years.
Papenfuss built and led DSV's therapeutics team and founded 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies there. She previously held roles at LifeArc and the Cell & Gene Therapy Catapult.
Hammond co-founded DSV and led its engineering work on agentic scientific discovery. He was earlier involved in licensing and investment at Imperial College, whose spin-outs during his time included Hinge Health, Hark and Monolith.
The product is a generative "world model" that simulates how tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue interact. The aim is to work out which drug combinations, in which order, are most likely to hold off cancer resistance.
The founders' arithmetic for why this needs a computer: a full pairwise screen of 100 drugs at 100 doses would take roughly 50 million lab experiments. Papenfuss puts the number of possible combinations at more than 900 billion.
The company says its predictions have been tested against real clinical data. On its own account it correctly forecast the failure of Regeneron's fianlimab trial, and of 14 predictions posted ahead of the 2026 ASCO oncology conference, 12 proved accurate.
Its advisers include Dr Laura Rosenberg and Dr Duncan Young, both of AstraZeneca, Dr Garry Pairaudeau, former chief technology officer of Exscientia, and Dr Christian Dillon of PhoreMost.
The money goes on moving the first designed combinations out of the model and into the wet lab. The initial focus is cancer and immune-mediated disease, with a longer-term aim of designing new treatments rather than recombining existing ones.
For founders in capital-hungry sectors, the structure is the interesting part. Pairing a modest equity round with a grant programme that supports investor-backed companies let two first-time-company founders reach seven figures while handing over equity on only £1.5 million of it.