- Sightera Biosciences, a Belgian techbio company, has raised €3 million in a pre-seed round led by Entourage, Anacura, and QBIC. The funding will help grow its AI drug discovery platform.
- Sightera takes a different approach from most AI drug discovery companies. It starts by training its models on data from patients who do not respond to treatment, then designs new molecules. This is the opposite of the usual chemistry-first method.
- The University of Antwerp and UZA spin-off will use the funding to advance its main molecular-glue oncology program, SIGHT001, toward selecting a preclinical candidate. This will prepare the company for a larger funding round at the clinical stage.
Most AI drug discovery companies start by selecting a target and designing a molecule, then seeking biological validation. Sightera Biosciences does the opposite: it begins with the most treatment-resistant patients and works backwards to create effective therapies.
The Antwerp-based company, founded in 2024, just closed a €3 million pre-seed round led by Entourage, Anacura, and QBIC.
“Drug discovery should start with the patient, not end there. That is where Sightera begins,” the company states. Sightera, a spin-off from the University of Antwerp and Antwerp University Hospital, is based at the Darwin Incubator in Niel, Belgium.
Starting with the toughest cases
Sightera’s platform begins with samples from patients whose cancer or fibrosis no longer responds to standard treatments, a process they call extreme biology. The company grows this tissue into organoids and runs high-throughput drug screens. This approach creates long-term data on how resistant diseases react to therapy. After collecting this data, their AI designs small molecules tailored to produce the desired biological response.
“Many AI drug discovery platforms begin by designing novel molecules against a predefined biological target and only then evaluate their activity in complex biological models. At Sightera, we reverse that paradigm. We start with complex patient-derived biology, learn directly from therapeutic responses in patient-derived biology, and use those insights to design entirely new small molecules,” says Hendrik Vercammen, the company’s co-founder and CEO, in the announcement.
Vercammen has a PhD in medical sciences from the University of Antwerp and has worked in translational drug discovery, AI, and entrepreneurship. He co-founded Sightera with Maxim Le Compte, the chief scientific officer and a biomedical researcher with a PhD in oncology who focuses on turning patient-derived biology into new treatments. The team also includes chief business officer Lars Vanlommel, who has experience in corporate finance at Lotus Bakeries and CMB.TECH, and chief data officer Christophe Deben, a University of Antwerp professor who set up the Antwerp Tumoroid Biobank.
An unusual investor for a biotech bet
Entourage, an early-stage investor based in Ghent, usually invests in B2B software, so its decision to back a molecular glue oncology company is unusual.
The firm says, “At Entourage, we back founders who rethink entire industries from first principles. Sightera doesn’t ask AI to predict biology. It lets biology teach AI. That’s a fundamentally different approach to drug discovery.”
The announcement also noted that as many blockbuster drugs lose patent protection, pharmaceutical companies need faster ways to develop new medicines.
QBIC, another lead investor, is one of Europe’s largest inter-university spin-off funds. It has supported many Flemish biotech and medtech companies through its links with the universities of Ghent, Brussels, and Antwerp. Anacura, the third investor, brings expertise in life sciences operations.
A crowded field with two different starting points
Sightera is not the only company that focuses on using real patient tissue instead of synthetic training data. Graph Therapeutics, founded by the team behind Allcyte, raised $5 million from Daphni in June to use a similar living-tissue approach to treat immune diseases.
Larger companies take the opposite approach. Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spin-out, raised $2.1 billion in May to build a broad AI drug design platform for many diseases. Chai Discovery tripled its value to $3.8 billion in seven months with its foundation-model approach to molecule design.
Sightera’s main technology-first competitors include Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Insilico Medicine, and Exscientia, which usually validate AI-designed molecules against complex disease models after creating the chemistry.
The global AI drug discovery market was valued at roughly $2.35 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $13.77 billion by 2033, growing at nearly 25% annually. Oncology is the largest single therapeutic segment, and the rising cost of traditional drug development, which routinely exceeds $2 billion per approved drug, is pushing pharma toward AI-native platforms.
The €3 million round will support team expansion and advance its lead molecular glue oncology program, SIGHT001, toward preclinical candidate selection.
Vercammen emphasised that this is not the company’s final funding request: “We are currently preparing a larger financing round to take our lead program SIGHT001 into clinical trials, to put our drug into patients and prove our hypothesis clinically. This recently closed €3 million round is a first, important step toward that goal.”
