Generare raises $23.2M to discover unknown molecules and develop new drugs

Generare Bioscience SASa Parisian biotechnology company that generates unprecedented molecular data for drug development using artificial intelligence, announced today that it has raised 20 million Euros, approximately $23.3 million, in the first funding round co-led by Alven and Daphni.

All existing investors, including Galion.exe, Teampact Ventures and Vives Partners, joined the Series A round.

Established in 2023, General builds the largest database of undiscovered molecular chemistry and categorizes it within a library of compounds characterized by structure, biological activity and drug potential.

The company said that much of the pharmaceutical industry has operated in a very narrow chemical window for decades – not by choice, but because the information was not available. General unlocks the information encoded in microbial genomes, where detailed molecular information has been stored and evolution has spent 3 billion years working.

Generare estimates that about 97% of the genomic data available to humans remains buried in microbial genomes, unstudied. General It said it generates value from this missing data, providing quality and scale.

Microbial genomes have become a rich source for drug discovery. Examples of drugs derived from bacteria include Lugdunin, an antibiotic derived from bacteria found in the human nose; Taromycin A/B, obtained from the Actinobacteria genome, is a potent antibiotic Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureusdevastating disease resistant to bacteria; and Vidarabine, an antibiotic derived from a marine fungus related to sponges.

The company specializes in small molecules – the class of chemicals from which most popular drugs are made.

“Drug discovery has a data problem. Every field trains its models on the same recycled chemistry and expects different results,” says founder and CEO Guillaume Vandenesch. “The bottleneck isn’t the algorithms, it’s the absence of real, high-quality molecular data and we’re solving that by building a large proprietary dataset of secret small molecules.”

By providing novel, newly discovered small molecule data from an unexplored area of ​​microbial genomics, Generare expects to revolutionize the current AI drug discovery industry. Only in 2025, all the other players together get a few new molecules; Generare received more than 200.

The company said it will use the funding to significantly accelerate that discovery pattern by increasing its capacity 10-fold by 2027 to more than 2,000 molecules, with the goal of exceeding 10,000 later. It also aims to double its team of 25 biologists, chemists, synthetic biologists, technicians and engineers.

Photo: Generare Bioscience