Pre-Seed17 September 2026

Big Picture Bio secures £1.5m pre-seed funding from Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures to advance oncology platform

The pre-seed round was co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures and will support the transition of designed drug combinations into wet-lab validation.

£1.5MPre-Seed

Big Picture Bio develops AI-designed combination therapies for cancer and other complex diseases using a generative world model.

Big Picture Bio has secured £1.5m in pre-seed funding to advance its AI-driven platform for designing cancer combination therapies. The investment round was co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, with participation from Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White.

Alongside the equity financing, the company received £700k in non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK. The combined capital will support the business as it transitions its first designed drug combinations from in-silico modelling into wet-lab validation.

Founded by Deep Science Ventures alumni, the company uses a generative world model to simulate interactions between tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue. The approach aims to address the challenge of identifying effective drug combinations and sequencing strategies in oncology.

From the founder

"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. 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."

Kerstin Papenfuss

CEO and co-founder at Big Picture Bio

Investor perspective

"For a decade, Mark and Kerstin have steered DSV through the creation of a slew of extremely exciting companies solving precisely these kinds of complex diseases, including Neobe, Cureage and Kindling, and almost every company they have built is on track to make it into the clinic. Instilling that experience and expertise into a model that moves beyond the bleeding edge in AI to solve complex diseases at scale is a natural evolution of the methodology for building advanced therapeutics companies at DSV. It’s been the greatest privilege of my career to build DSV alongside Mark and Kerstin and I am so glad DSV can be a part of the next phase of their journey."

Dom Falcao

Founder, Deep Science Ventures