London-based Big Picture Bio has emerged from stealth with £2.2m, split between a £1.5m pre-seed equity round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures and £700k of non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK. The company is building generative models to design cancer combination therapies.
The structure is the interesting part. Of the £2.2m total, only £1.5m sits on the cap table as equity. The remaining £700k comes through Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships programme, which matches private money with grant funding and takes no shares — leaving the founders and seed backers with roughly a third more capital than the equity round alone would have bought.
Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures co-led the pre-seed. Gloucester Ventures also participated, alongside angel investor John White. No valuation was disclosed, and the company has not published a pre- or post-money figure.
Big Picture Bio was founded by Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, chief executive, and Dr Mark Hammond, chief technology officer, both of whom come out of Deep Science Ventures. Papenfuss was director of pharma at the venture builder, where she founded 12 therapeutics companies. Hammond co-founded Deep Science Ventures and led its work on agentic scientific discovery.
The technical pitch is combinatorial. Oncology drugs are typically developed against single targets, but patients are usually treated with combinations, and the number of possible pairings runs past 900bn. Big Picture Bio is building generative models that simulate interactions between tumour, immune cells and surrounding tissue across disease sites and patient populations, then ranks which combinations and sequences are most likely to hold up against resistance.
"Cancer is not one disease driven by one target," Papenfuss said. "Combinations are how we beat it."
The £2.2m is earmarked for moving designed combinations out of computation and into wet lab validation — the step that determines whether the models produce candidates a pharmaceutical partner would license. That is a short runway for a therapeutics business, which points to a seed round once the first validation data lands.
The company has assembled an advisory board weighted towards pharma and prior AI-drug exits: Dr Laura Rosenberg and Dr Duncan Young, both of AstraZeneca, in target validation and oncology business development respectively; Dr Garry Pairaudeau, chief executive of DaltonTx and former chief technology officer of Exscientia; and Dr Christian Dillon, chief scientific officer of PhoreMost.
The round is small against the UK's headline AI health cheques, but the funding mix is increasingly standard at pre-seed in British deep tech, where Innovate UK money and regional funds are doing the work that would otherwise require selling more equity at the cheapest point in a company's life.
Original source: EU-Startups — https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/09/london-based-big-picture-bio-emerges-from-stealth-with-e2-55-million-to-develop-ai-designed-cancer-drug-combinations
