Biotech firm Big Picture Bio raises £1.5m led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures
This article covers Big Picture Bio, a cancer drug discovery biotech startup that has raised £1.5m in a seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, alongside £700k in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships Programme, taking total backing to £2.2m. The funding will enable the startup to move its AI-designed drug combinations from in-silico work into wet-lab validation, targeting oncology and immune-mediated diseases to accelerate identification of clinically meaningful combination regimens.
Big Picture Bio, a cancer drug discovery biotech startup, has raised £1.5m in a seed funding round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, with participation from Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White. The raise sits alongside £700,000 in non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships Programme, taking total support to £2.2m — money the company will use to move its AI-designed drug combinations from in-silico work into wet-lab validation.
Why it matters
Oncology faces a combinatorial problem: more than 900 billion theoretical drug combinations far exceed experimental capacity. That forces researchers to test combinations they can reach rather than those most likely to work. Big Picture Bio aims to change that by using a generative world model to prioritise combinations and treatment sequencing that reduce residual disease, potentially accelerating the identification of clinically meaningful regimens.
If the approach proves robust, it could shift how companies and pharma partners design combination studies, reduce the cost and duration of early testing, and improve the signal-to-noise for trials that follow.
Inside the product
Big Picture Bio says its platform models interactions among tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue across disease sites and patient subgroups. The company pairs agentic, explainable modelling with targeted wet-lab validation so predictions can be traced back to underlying biology rather than treated as black-box outputs.
The platform has been benchmarked against real-world clinical outcomes presented at ASCO and, according to the company, correctly predicted the failure of Regeneron’s fianlimab trial. Rather than selling clinical prediction as an end product, Big Picture Bio plans to use those validations to test whether the model selects combinations likely to have clinical impact. The initial indication set includes cancer and immune-mediated diseases.
Funding from this round will support the first set of model-designed combinations as they move into laboratory validation.
Who are the investors?
The round was co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, with participation from Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White. Innovate UK contributed £700,000 in non-dilutive support through its Investor Partnerships Programme, bringing headline funding to £2.2m.
In the announcement, Remy Kesrouani, Managing Partner at Kadmos Capital, said:
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. 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.
In the announcement, Paolo Pio, Co-founder & General Partner at Exceptional Ventures, said:
Big Picture Bio is going after a problem at the heart of modern oncology - how to identify the right combination therapies faster and with greater confidence. We believe the team has the scientific depth, technical ambition and commercial focus to build something genuinely important - a platform that can deliver value to partners today while laying the foundation for the next generation of cancer therapies. We are proud to co-lead the round along with Kadmos and support the company's next stage of growth.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of biotech venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of biotech angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
Big Picture Bio was founded by Dr Kerstin Papenfuss (CEO) and Dr Mark Hammond (CTO). Papenfuss previously served as Director of Pharma at Deep Science Ventures, where she helped found a number of therapeutics and enabling-technology companies. Hammond co-founded Deep Science Ventures and led its engineering work in agentic scientific discovery.
The company’s advisory team includes senior industry figures: Laura Rosenberg, Director of Target Validation at AstraZeneca; Dr Duncan Young, Head of Search & Evaluation, Oncology Business Development & Licensing at AstraZeneca; Dr Garry Pairaudeau, CEO and co-founder of DaltonTx and former CTO of Exscientia; and Dr Christian Dillon, Chief Scientific Officer at PhoreMost.
In the announcement, Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, Co-founder & CEO at Big Picture Bio, said:
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.
In the announcement, Dom Falcao, Founder at Deep Science Ventures, said:
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.
Briefly, the cited portfolio examples — Neobe, Cureage and Kindling — are DSV-derived ventures focused on therapeutics that are advancing toward clinical testing, used here as evidence of the founders’ track record in translating early science towards trials.
The bigger picture
The deal sits at the intersection of AI-driven drug discovery and the UK biotech ecosystem. Innovate UK’s participation signals continued public support for de-risking early-stage biotech innovation, while investor interest from niche funds and angels reflects appetite for companies that combine computational platforms with wet-lab validation.
Big Picture Bio is part of a broader trend where UK teams with ties to Deep Science Ventures and pharma advisers attempt to move computational predictions into experimentally validated programmes. Success will depend on reproducible signals in the lab and the ability to translate those into partner-ready assets or co-development collaborations with larger pharma players.
The funding and advisory links underline how public programmes, specialist investors and industry partnerships remain central to advancing next-generation drug discovery across the UK and Europe.
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