AI Startup Emerges From Stealth With $2.8M to Crack Cancer's Toughest Code

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-18

Big Picture Bio, a London-based startup, just stepped out of stealth with a combined funding round of $2.8 million (€2.55 million). They're using AI to design combination therapies for cancer and other complex diseases. ### The Funding Breakdown The round includes: - A $1.9 million (€1.75 million) pre-Seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures. - $885k (€815k) in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships Programme. - Participation from Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White. "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 at 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." ### Meet the Founders CEO Dr. Kerstin Papenfuss and CTO Dr. Mark Hammond are no strangers to building deep tech companies. Before spinning out Big Picture Bio, both spent years at Deep Science Ventures. Papenfuss built and led DSV's therapeutics team, founding 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies. She previously held roles at LifeArc and the Cell & Gene Therapy Catapult. Hammond co-founded DSV and grew it from $190k (€174k) to a portfolio worth over $1.2 billion (€1.16 billion+). He 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, tackling complex, evolving diseases. 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. ### The Tech: A Generative "World Model" Big Picture Bio has built a generative "world model" that simulates how tumors, immune cells, and surrounding tissue interact. The goal? Identify which drug combinations, and in what sequence, are most likely to hold off cancer resistance. The company says its predictive approach has already been tested against real clinical data. They correctly forecasted the failure of Regeneron's fianlimab trial and posted 14 predictions ahead of the 2026 ASCO oncology conference—12 of which 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. Papenfuss. She continued: "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 Pharma Brains on Board The advisory team includes heavy hitters: - 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. - Dr. Christian Dillon, Chief Scientific Officer at PhoreMost. With this funding, Big Picture Bio will move its AI-designed cancer combination therapies from computer models into the wet lab. They'll initially focus on cancer and immune-mediated diseases but aim to move beyond trial-and-error combination testing altogether. If they pull it off, it could change how we develop cancer drugs—and maybe even give patients a better shot at beating the disease.