- In just three years, Generare has become the most prominent platform generating evolution-based molecular data that the world has been missing
- Its proprietary tech has revealed 200 previously uncharacterized, small molecules with a hit rate matching the most successful drug discovery programmes in history
- In 2025 alone, Generare characterized five times more novel molecules than every other player in the field combined
- The funding, co-led by Alven and Daphni, will be used to scale Generare's molecular dataset ten-fold by 2027 as demand from world-leading life science companies grows
Thursday, 2 April, 2026: Generare – the techbio company generating novel, high-quality molecular data for drug development by decoding what life wrote – has raised €20M in Series A funding co-led by Alven and Daphni with participation from all existing investors, including Galion.exe, Teampact Ventures and VIVES Partners. The funding will be used to increase Generare's drug discovery compound library, grow its world-class team and scale its proven discovery platform to meet growing demand from pharmaceutical giants and agrochemical companies.
Decoding what life wrote
Founded in 2023 by *CEO Guillaume Vandenesch and CSO Dr Vincent Libis, Generare is building the highest quality dataset of untapped molecular chemistry: a growing library of novel compounds characterized for structure, biological activity and drug potential.
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.
Generare's proprietary high-throughput cloning and sequencing technology, validated through ERC-funded academic research and multiple peer-reviewed publications, decodes this cryptic chemistry at scale. It screens tens of thousands of microbial genomes, identifies gene sequences most likely to produce bioactive molecules, expresses them, and characterizes the resulting compounds for structure, biological activity and drug potential.
Generare specialises in small molecules – the class of compounds behind the world’s best-known medicines – and each new small molecule it uncovers becomes a new data point, feeding a dataset that grows with every cycle.
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.”
Molecular data no AI model has ever been trained on
This compounding cycle is what makes Generare's dataset so valuable to partners, including some of the world's most recognizable pharmaceutical companies, and is increasingly critical as AI reshapes drug discovery. AI can accelerate the search for new medicines, but it can’t create truly novel chemistry to learn on. Without novel data, models will keep converging on the same outcomes, regardless of their sophistication. Feed them genuinely new structures selected by evolution with the corresponding biological activity, and the impact multiplies.
Market-leading traction
In just three years, Generare has become the prominent platform generating more evolution-based molecular data than anyone else. In 2025, all players combined discovered a few dozen new molecules; Generare alone revealed over 200. These molecules are now being used by research laboratories to develop new medicines for life threatening diseases.
The funding will enable Generare to scale this capacity 10-fold by 2027 to 2,000+ molecules, with a view of growing past 10,000 over time and effectively compressing what took a century of discovery into a matter of years. It will enable the near-doubling of Generare's 25-strong team of computational biologists, chemists, synthetic biologists, technicians and engineers, drawn from France, the UK, the US, Germany, Australia and beyond. Among those advising the company are Dr Frank Petersen, former Executive Director of Novartis's Natural Products Chemistry Department, and Professor Nadine Ziemert, one of Europe's foremost experts of microbial biosynthetic gene clusters.
Dr Vincent Libis, CSO and Co-Founder at Generare said: "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."
Maria Tahri, Bio Investor at Alven said: "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.”
Paul Bazin, Partner at daphni said: "From penicillin onwards, modern pharma was born from natural products. Yet for decades the industry has been constrained by its inability to access new evolution-derived molecules. 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.”
ENDS
Editor’s Notes:
Dr Frank Petersen, Head of Scientific Advisory Board at Generare, said: “The incredible speed with which this innovative platform converts raw genome sequences into high‑quality, AI‑ready data, combined with the team’s rigor and deeply integrated expertise at every step, is unlike anything I’ve seen from a company at this stage. What Generare is building will shape the discovery of bioactive substances from nature for the pharmaceutical, agribusiness, and cosmetics sectors for a long time to come.”
*CEO Guillaume Vandenesch, a former biotech engineer, helped scale Hello Tomorrow, a global non-profit that supports and accelerates the development of deep tech startups. As a Director, he took innovation studio Possible Future to an exit to Capgemini in 2022.
*CSO Vincent Libis, Pharm.D, Ph.D, has spent a decade pioneering synthetic biology approaches for the manipulation of biosynthetic gene clusters in the context of drug discovery. Previously a co-founder of Abolis Biotechnologies and postdoctoral researcher at Rockefeller University, his work as an INSERM team leader was awarded a prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) and formed the scientific foundation behind Generare's platform.
About Generare:
Generare is a Paris-based techbio company founded in 2023 by Dr Vincent Libis and Guillaume Vandenesch. Its proprietary platform decodes 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. Find out more at generare.bio
About Alven
Founded in 2000, Alven is an independent early-stage venture capital firm backing European entrepreneurs building category-defining companies with global ambition. With over €1.5B in assets under management, Alven has invested in more than 160 startups over the past two decades, including Qonto, Dataiku, Algolia, Stripe and Cardiologs. Focused on Seed and Series A, the firm invests across AI, healthcare, fintech and consumer platforms. With its sixth €350M fund, Alven continues to support founders from the earliest stages through scale, leveraging a hands-on approach and deep operational expertise. www.alven.co
About Daphni
Founded in 2015, daphni is a mission-driven venture capital firm and certified B Corp, investing in breakthrough technologies and sustainable projects. It has over 70 active portfolio companies, including Back Market, Pasqal, Carbon Maps, Hubcycle, Swile, Moonwatt and Geev. Supported by a community of 400 experts, daphni leverages its proprietary platform, Flamel. It also manages Dastore, a tech retail fund in partnership with Carrefour, and launched in March 2026 Time4, a fund dedicated to backing early-stage entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds. In parallel, its endowment fund Rainbow supports social inclusion initiatives. www.daphni.com