Over the past few years, billions in venture capital have poured into AI drug discovery. But the sector is hitting a wall. Even the most sophisticated machine learning models are fundamentally constrained by the data they are trained on, and right now, they are all recycling the same limited, synthetic datasets.
Paris-based techbio startup Generare is reopening nature’s pharmacy at an industrial scale. The company just raised a €20 million Series A co-led by Alven and Daphni, with participation from Galion.exe, Teampact Ventures, and VIVES Partners. The round follows a €5 million seed injection in 2024, signalling heavy investor appetite for biological data.
“The field was largely abandoned as discovery became prohibitively slow and expensive, as the most accessible molecules had already been found, and each new discovery required disproportionate effort. As a result, even the most advanced and powerful models keep converging toward the same regions of chemical space, rather than uncovering genuinely new biology,” Generare told TFN.
A platform built on evolution’s blueprint
Founded in 2023 by deeptech execs Guillaume Vandenesch (formerly of Hello Tomorrow and Capgemini Invent) and Dr Vincent Libis, a pioneer in synthetic biology whose foundational research was backed by the European Research Council, the company is generating the data no one else has.
Using high-throughput cloning and sequencing technology, Generare decodes microbial genomes to identify gene sequences most likely to produce bioactive molecules. It then characterises the resulting “cryptic” small molecules in terms of structure, biological activity, and drug potential.
The approach is already yielding unprecedented volume. In 2025 alone, while the rest of the industry combined discovered only a few dozen new molecules from evolutionary sources, Generare uncovered more than 200.
Crucially, these molecules boast hit rates comparable to some of history’s most successful drug discovery programmes, and are already being deployed by research labs to develop treatments for life-threatening diseases.
By mapping this untapped biology, Generare is building a compounding structural advantage. Its direct competitors include companies like Halo Biotech, Cube Biotech, and SynBioBeta portfolio players working in microbial natural product discovery, as well as AI-native drug discovery platforms such as Exscientia, Insilico Medicine, and Recursion Pharmaceuticals that face the same data bottleneck that Generare solves by generating novel evolutionary chemistry.
“Most platforms, regardless of their approach, whether that’s the AI discovery firms or traditional natural products companies, are working with the data they already have. We’re generating the missing data. That makes us less of a competitor to other platforms in this space and more of a foundation for them,” Generare elaborates.
Scaling the dataset
The fresh €20 million injection will be used to scale Generare’s capacity tenfold. From its current baseline of 200 novel molecules, the company aims to produce 2,000 by 2027, with a five-year target of surpassing 10,000.
To get there, Generare is expanding its 25-strong team of computational biologists, chemists, and engineers. The company places heavy emphasis on diversity as a core operational strength; its Paris-based team currently represents eight nationalities and is 52% female, a notable metric in the traditionally male-dominated deeptech sector.
As Paul Bazin, Partner at Daphni, puts it, “Generare removes this fundamental bottleneck. By unlocking the remaining 97% of natural products encoded in microbial genomes, they’re not just expanding chemical space; they’re redefining it. This marks a profound shift for the industry: the challenge is no longer designing new molecules, but understanding how to best translate this reservoir of biology into breakthroughs across healthcare and agriculture.”
