Paris-based biotech Generare says it found more novel molecules in 2025 than the rest of the field combined.
In drug discovery, finding something truly new is getting harder. Not because scientists have stopped looking, but because much of the industry keeps searching through the same old drawers. The tools may be more sophisticated now – AI, automation, predictive models – but if everyone is working from similar chemical libraries, they often end up circling familiar ground.
That is the problem Paris-based biotech company Generare wants to solve, and investors appear to believe it may be onto something.
The company has raised $21.6 million (€20 million) in Series A funding, in a round co-led by Alven and Daphni, with participation from existing backers including Galion.exe, Teampact Ventures and VIVES Partners. The money will go toward expanding Generare’s compound library, growing its team and scaling a platform designed to uncover previously hidden small molecules that could become the starting point for future medicines.
For longevity watchers, this is a reminder that the future of healthier aging may depend not only on better algorithms or faster clinical pipelines, but on something much more basic: access to new biology.
The industry’s real bottleneck may not be AI
There is no shortage of excitement around AI in drug discovery. However, a question lurks beneath all the hype: what happens when powerful models are trained on stale or repetitive data? That is where Generare’s pitch becomes interesting.
“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,” said Guillaume Vandenesch, CEO and co-founder of Generare.
Vandenesch said that these molecules, shaped by three billion years of evolution and possessing drug properties unmatched by any synthetic library, would serve as the foundation for the next century of drug discovery. It is a pointed and timely argument.
Think of it this way: AI in biotech is often described as a brilliant chef, but even the best chef can only do so much if everyone is cooking from the same pantry. Generare is trying to stock the shelves with ingredients the industry has barely touched.
Reading the parts of nature we have ignored
Founded in 2023 by Vandenesch and CSO Dr Vincent Libis, Generare is building what it describes as a high-quality dataset of untapped molecular chemistry, a growing library of previously unknown compounds that have been characterized for their structure, biological activity and drug potential.
The company’s core idea is surprisingly intuitive. Microbes carry vast amounts of genetic information, and hidden inside that information are instructions for making molecules. Many of those molecules may have useful biological effects, but most have remained inaccessible because the industry lacked efficient ways to find and test them at scale.
Generare’s platform scans microbial genomes, identifies promising genetic sequences, brings those sequences into the lab and then evaluates the molecules they produce. In other words, it is not “inventing” nature from scratch; it is reading chemical recipes that have been sitting in the margins for billions of years.
That matters because many of medicine’s most powerful drugs have roots in nature. Yet Generare says roughly 97% of natural products encoded in microbial genomes remain unread.
In a field obsessed with designing the next molecule, Generare is making a different bet that maybe some of the best drug leads have already been written; we just have not learned how to read them properly.
A standout 2025, if the momentum holds
Generare says it uncovered more than 200 previously uncharacterized small molecules in 2025 alone. By comparison, it says all other players in the field combined discovered only a few dozen. If the number proves durable, it would mark a meaningful shift in what “scale” looks like for nature-based drug discovery.
Small molecules remain the backbone of modern medicine. They are the compounds behind many of the drugs people actually take, from pills for chronic disease to targeted therapies in oncology. Finding new ones with real biological relevance is difficult, expensive and often painfully slow.
Generare’s reported hit rate, paired with the volume of novel compounds it says it is producing, helps explain why investors are leaning in. These molecules are already being used by research laboratories developing medicines for life-threatening diseases, according to the company.
Longevity should pay attention
Whether the target is neurodegeneration, cancer, fibrosis, immune decline or metabolic dysfunction, the same reality keeps surfacing: the field needs better interventions, and better interventions start with better drug candidates. This is why Generare’s model could matter beyond its own cap table.
If longevity biotech is going to move from promise to durable clinical impact, it will need access to new mechanisms of action – new ways to influence biology, not just faster ways to optimize familiar ones. Nature has historically been one of the best sources of those mechanisms.
“Nature has been the n°1 source of innovative modes of action for drugs and we’ve only scratched the surface of its potential,” said Dr Vincent Libis, CSO and co-founder. “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.”
That last phrase: new starting points. In longevity, where many of the hardest diseases of aging remain stubbornly under-treated, new starting points are not a luxury. They are the difference between incremental improvement and real therapeutic breakthroughs.
From hundreds to thousands
The new capital will be used to significantly scale Generare’s molecular discovery engine. The company says it plans to increase capacity 10-fold by 2027, reaching more than 2,000 molecules, with ambitions to grow beyond 10,000 over time. It also plans to nearly double its current 25-person team.
There is, of course, a long road between discovering a promising molecule and turning it into an approved medicine. Plenty of molecules go nowhere. Plenty of beautiful datasets never become transformative drugs.
Nonetheless, that is also what makes this funding round notable. It is betting on infrastructure, on the idea that in an era of AI-driven biotech, the real competitive moat may belong to companies that can surface genuinely new biological data before everyone else.
For longevity, that is a compelling thesis. Because if we want better medicines for the biology of aging, we may first need to widen the search itself.
