Paris-based techbio company Generare has raised €20 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Alven and Daphni, with participation from existing investors including Galion.exe, Teampact Ventures and VIVES Partners. Founded in 2023, the company is focused on unlocking previously inaccessible areas of chemical space by decoding microbial DNA to generate novel, high-quality molecular data for drug discovery.
Generare has positioned itself at the forefront of a major shift in pharmaceutical research by addressing what it describes as a core limitation in the industry, the lack of access to new molecular data. While traditional drug discovery has relied on a narrow subset of known chemistry, representing roughly 3 percent of the total, Generare is targeting the remaining 97 percent embedded within microbial genomes. This untapped reservoir of chemistry has been shaped by billions of years of evolution but has remained largely inaccessible due to technological constraints.
Using proprietary high-throughput cloning and sequencing technology, the company screens tens of thousands of microbial genomes to identify gene sequences likely to produce bioactive compounds. These sequences are expressed and analyzed to determine molecular structure, biological activity and drug potential. Each discovery feeds into a growing proprietary dataset designed to support both internal research and partnerships with pharmaceutical and life sciences companies.
In 2025, Generare reported generating more than 200 new small molecules, significantly exceeding the industry average of around 45 molecules per cycle. The company claims this output represents five times more novel molecules than all other players in the field combined during the same period. These molecules are already being used in research programs targeting life-threatening diseases.
The newly raised capital will be used to scale Generare’s molecular dataset tenfold by 2027, expand its compound library and nearly double its team of 25 specialists across computational biology, chemistry, synthetic biology and engineering. The company ultimately aims to generate more than 10,000 molecules over time, compressing what has historically taken decades of discovery into a much shorter timeframe.
Generare’s approach is also closely aligned with the growing role of artificial intelligence in drug discovery. While AI has accelerated molecule identification and optimization, its effectiveness depends heavily on the quality and novelty of training data. By generating entirely new molecular structures derived from evolutionary biology, Generare aims to provide datasets that enable AI models to explore previously unreachable areas of chemistry.
The company has already attracted interest from major pharmaceutical and agrochemical firms seeking new starting points for drug development. Its platform is designed to continuously improve as more molecules are discovered, creating a compounding data advantage that strengthens its position in the emerging techbio landscape.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Guillaume Vandenesch, CEO and Co-Founder of Generare
“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.”
Dr. Vincent Libis, CSO and Co-Founder of Generare
“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.”
Maria Tahri, Bio Investor at Alven
“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.”
Paul Bazin, Partner at Daphni
