Generare secures €20M to unravel 97% of microbial chemistry.

      The Paris-based techbio firm analyzes microbial genomes to discover molecules that have evolved over three billion years, asserting that it identified more new small molecules in 2025 than the entire industry combined. Alven and Daphni co-led the Series A funding round.

      Generare, the Paris techbio enterprise extracting molecules from microbial genomes for drug development, has raised €20 million in a Series A round co-led by Alven and Daphni, with existing investors such as Galion.exe, Teampact Ventures, and VIVES Partners also participating.

      The company was established by CEO Guillaume Vandenesch and CSO Dr. Vincent Libis, who brings a decade of experience in synthetic biology research, ERC grant funding, and prior co-founding roles at Abolis Biotechnologies. This funding round follows a €5 million seed round in 2024.

      While the scientific premise is clear, the technical hurdles are significant. Microorganisms, including bacteria, fungi, and other microbes, encode molecular chemistry in their genes – essentially biological blueprints for small molecules shaped by three billion years of evolution.

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      Historically, these molecules served as essential resources for drug discovery; penicillin is the most notable example of a microbial compound that has been turned into medicine. However, traditional chemistry techniques have only been able to tap into a small portion of this chemistry.

      Generare estimates that around 97% of the molecular chemistry encoded in microbial genomes remains unexplored.

      The company's platform employs high-throughput cloning and sequencing technologies, validated through ERC-funded academic research and peer-reviewed studies, to screen tens of thousands of microbial genomes, identify gene sequences likely to produce bioactive molecules, express them, and analyze the resulting compounds for their structure, biological activity, and potential as drugs.

      The firm claims to have characterized over 200 previously unknown small molecules, with a hit rate comparable to the most successful drug discovery initiatives in history. It asserts that in 2025 alone, it identified five times more novel molecules than all other industry players combined.

      These figures are provided by the company and have not been independently verified. However, the scientific methodology is corroborated: TechCrunch's 2024 reporting on the seed round affirmed the cloning and biosynthetic techniques and Dr. Libis's credentials from Rockefeller University and as a leader at INSERM.

      The partners include unnamed pharmaceutical and agrochemical firms, referred to as "some of the world’s most recognized pharmaceutical companies."

      The €20 million Series A will finance a ten-fold increase in the molecule library by 2027, expanding from approximately 200 to over 2,000 compounds, with a long-term goal of reaching 10,000.

      The current team of 25, consisting of computational biologists, chemists, synthetic biologists, technicians, and engineers from France, the UK, the US, Germany, and Australia, will nearly double in size.

      Advisors include Dr. Frank Petersen, former Executive Director of Novartis’s Natural Products Chemistry Department, and Professor Nadine Ziemert, recognized as one of Europe’s leading experts on microbial biosynthetic gene clusters.

      The strategic rationale is data-oriented: AI drug discovery models that are trained on the same recycled chemistry will likely lead to similar outcomes. By providing them with genuinely unique structures with associated biological activity, the potential for diverse results increases significantly.