AI Startup's $2.9M Bet to Beat Cancer With 900 Billion Drug Combos

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-18

### From Stealth to the Lab: Big Picture Bio's $2.9M Leap What if we could predict which cancer drug combinations will work before ever running a lab test? That's the bold bet behind Big Picture Bio, a London-based biotech startup that just emerged from stealth with a combined funding round of €2.55 million (about $2.9 million). The funding breaks down into a €1.75 million ($2.0 million) pre-Seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, plus €815,000 ($930,000) in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships Programme. Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White also joined the pre-Seed round. ### The Team Behind the Model Founded by CEO Dr. Kerstin Papenfuss and CTO Dr. Mark Hammond, Big Picture Bio has built a generative "world model" that simulates how tumors, immune cells, and surrounding tissue interact. The goal? To identify which drug combinations—and in what sequence—are most likely to hold off cancer resistance. Before spinning out, both founders spent years at Deep Science Ventures. Papenfuss built and led DSV's therapeutics team, founding 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies. Hammond co-founded DSV and took it "from €174k to a €1.16 billion+ portfolio" (roughly $200k to $1.3 billion), led its engineering work on agentic scientific discovery, and previously worked 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, tackling complex, evolving diseases. 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 their models can search computationally in seconds. ### Proven Predictions, Real Clinical Data The company says its predictive approach has already been tested against real clinical data. It correctly forecasted the failure of Regeneron's fianlimab trial and posted 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. "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 includes senior pharma expertise from AstraZeneca, Exscientia, and PhoreMost. With the new funding, the company will take its AI-designed cancer combination therapies from computer models into the wet lab, initially focusing on cancer and immune-mediated diseases. The ultimate aim? To move beyond trial-and-error combination testing altogether. ### Why This Matters for European Startups Big Picture Bio's success also highlights the growing appeal of the EU Inc proposal, which aims to simplify incorporation for startups across Europe. By creating a unified legal framework, the proposal could make it easier for companies like Big Picture Bio to raise capital and scale across borders. For now, though, the startup is focused on turning its computational predictions into real-world therapies—one combination at a time.