Sightera Biosciences has raised €3m in pre-seed funding to expand its AI drug discovery platform and preclinical asset portfolio.
The Antwerp-based startup will use the funding to grow its team, accelerate development of its technology and portfolio, move its lead molecular glue oncology programme towards preclinical candidate selection and strengthen strategic partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
The financing was led by Entourage, Anacura and QBIC.
Pieterjan Bouten, general partner at Entourage, said: “At Entourage, we back founders who rethink entire industries from first principles.
“Sightera doesn’t ask AI to predict biology. It lets biology teach AI. That’s a fundamentally different approach to drug discovery.
“By learning directly from real patient biology, Sightera can identify promising new molecules in months instead of years. That speed matters.
“As billions in blockbuster drug revenues approach the patent cliff, pharma urgently needs a faster path to the next generation of medicines. We believe Sightera is built for exactly that moment.”
Sightera was founded in January 2025 by Hendrik Vercammen, chief executive, Maxim Le Compte, chief scientific officer, Lars Vanlommel, chief business officer, and Christophe Deben, chief development officer.
It became a spinout from the University of Antwerp and Antwerp University Hospital in January 2026.
The biotech company uses AI to discover and design potential medicines, with a current focus on oncology and fibrosis.
Sightera says its approach differs from many other AI drug discovery companies because its models are trained on proprietary data generated directly from patient-derived biological material, rather than generic or publicly available datasets.
The material comes from patients with advanced, treatment-resistant or end-stage diseases where conventional therapies have failed and the underlying biology has changed significantly. The company describes this as “extreme biology”.
Sightera uses the patient samples to establish scalable preclinical models, including patient-derived organoids, which aim to preserve features of the disease biology seen in humans.
These models are used in high-throughput drug screening campaigns to generate what the startup describes as “rich, dynamic and longitudinal” datasets showing how patient-derived biology responds to treatments over time.
Sightera’s AI platform is trained on these proprietary datasets and is used to design new small molecules whose behaviour in patient-derived biology is considered from the start.
The company says it designs molecules to produce a desired biological response in patient-derived systems, rather than focusing only on compounds with attractive chemical properties.
By building patient-derived biological responses into the design process from the beginning, Sightera aims to address one of the reasons some AI-designed drug candidates fail when moving towards clinical use.
Vercammen said: “Many AI drug discovery platforms begin by designing novel molecules against a predefined biological target and only then evaluate their activity in complex biological models.
“At Sightera, we reverse that paradigm.
“We start with complex patient-derived biology, learn directly from therapeutic responses in patient-derived biology, and use those insights to design entirely new small molecules.
“Our goal is not simply to accelerate drug discovery, but to improve the probability of clinical success by placing human disease biology at the very beginning of the drug discovery process,”
The company said the €3m round is a first step towards a larger financing intended to take its lead programme, SIGHT001, into human clinical trials.
