Generare, a Paris-based BioTech startup generating novel, high-quality molecular data for drug development by decoding microbial genomes, has raised €20 million in Series A funding to increase its drug discovery compound library, grow its team and scale its discovery platform.
The round was co-led by Alven and Daphni with participation from all existing investors, including Galion.exe, Teampact Ventures, and VIVES Partners.
Guillaume Vandenesch, CEO and co-founder, Generare, said, ”Drug discovery has a data problem. The entire field trains its models on the same recycled chemistry and expects different outcomes. The bottleneck is not algorithms, it is the absence of genuinely novel, high-quality molecular data and we’re solving that by building the largest proprietary dataset of cryptic small molecules. These molecules, shaped by 3 billion years of evolution and with drug properties no synthetic library can match, will fuel the next century of drug discovery.”
Founded in 2023 by Dr Vincent Libis and Guillaume Vandenesch, Generare’s proprietary platform claims to decode what life wrote. It reads microbial genomes, expresses their silent chemistry, and generates the novel, high-quality molecular data that drug development has been missing.
Generare states that it is building the highest quality dataset of untapped molecular chemistry: a growing library of novel compounds characterised for structure, biological activity and drug potential.
According to the company, drug discovery has operated inside the same narrow chemical space for decades, not by choice but because the data outside it didn’t exist. “Encoded in microbial genomes is a reservoir of molecular chemistry that evolution has spent three billion years writing – approximately 97% of which remains unread. Generare is generating that missing data, at a quality and scale the field has never seen, making it genuinely usable for drug development,” it mentioned in the press release.
Its proprietary high-throughput cloning and sequencing technology, validated through ERC-funded academic research and multiple peer-reviewed publications, decodes this cryptic chemistry at scale. The company screens tens of thousands of microbial genomes, identifies gene sequences most likely to produce bioactive molecules, expresses them, and characterises the resulting compounds for structure, biological activity and drug potential.
It states that its expertise lies in small molecules, the type of compounds responsible for many of the world’s most renowned medicines, and each new small molecule discovered adds to a growing dataset, which expands with each cycle.
Generare believes that this cycle of compounding is what makes its dataset so valuable to partners and is becoming even more essential as AI transforms drug discovery. While AI can accelerate the development of new medicines, it cannot create completely new chemistry to investigate. Without fresh data, models will keep producing similar results, regardless of their sophistication. Introducing truly new structures, selected through evolutionary processes and connected to biological activity, greatly improves their performance.
“Nature has been the n°1 source of innovative modes of action for drugs and we’ve only scratched the surface of its potential. We’re building the infrastructure to change that with the largest commercial library of evolution-derived molecules in the world, a dataset that improves with every cycle, and a platform that can supply companies with genuinely new starting points for drug discovery,” said Dr Vincent Libis, CSO and co-founder at Generare.
This new funding will allow Generare to increase this capacity tenfold by 2027 to over 2,000 molecules, aiming to surpass 10,000 eventually. It will also help nearly double Generare’s team of 25 experts, which includes computational biologists, chemists, synthetic biologists, technicians, and engineers from France, the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, and other countries.
The company’s advisors include Dr Frank Petersen, former Executive Director of Novartis’s Natural Products Chemistry Department, and Professor Nadine Ziemert, a leading European expert on microbial biosynthetic gene clusters.
“While techbio is accelerating drug discovery, Generare is pushing it further, reopening nature’s pharmacy at industrial scale. By harnessing genomics, synthetic biology and machine learning, the company generates proprietary datasets on unknown mechanisms of action, unlocking drug opportunities others cannot see and building a moat that is already attracting strong industry interest,” said Maria Tahri, Bio Investor at Alven.
In just three years, Generare claims that it has become the leading platform producing more evolution-based molecular data than any other. The company notes that in 2025, all players together discovered just a few dozen new molecules; Generare alone identified over 200. These molecules are now used by research laboratories to develop new medicines for life-threatening diseases.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/04/paris-based-generare-raises-e20-million-to-generate-novel-molecular-data-for-drug-development-from-microbial-genomes/
