Belgian techbio Sightera raises €3M to teach AI from 'extreme' patient biology

Sightera Biosciences, a Belgian techbio company, has raised €3 million in a pre-seed round co-led by Entourage, Anacura, and QBIC. The University of Antwerp and Antwerp University Hospital spin-off will use the money to advance its lead molecular-glue oncology program, SIGHT001, toward a preclinical candidate.

Founded in 2024, Sightera flips the standard AI drug discovery playbook. Instead of picking a target and designing a molecule, it starts with tissue from patients whose cancer or fibrosis no longer responds to treatment — a process it calls "extreme biology" — then works backwards to design new small molecules.

The company grows patient tissue into organoids, runs high-throughput drug screens, and feeds the results to its AI. "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," says co-founder and chief executive officer Hendrik Vercammen.

As blockbuster drugs lose patent protection, pharmaceutical firms need faster routes to new medicines. The round positions Sightera for a larger raise at the clinical stage.

Entourage, a Ghent-based early-stage investor, typically funds B2B software, making its move into oncology notable. "Sightera doesn't ask AI to predict biology. It lets biology teach AI," the firm says. QBIC, one of Europe's largest inter-university spin-off funds, and life-sciences operator Anacura round out the leads.

Sightera is not alone in betting on real patient tissue over synthetic data. Graph Therapeutics, built by the team behind Allcyte, raised $5 million from Daphni in June 2026 for a similar living-tissue approach.

At €3 million, Sightera's pre-seed sits in the 92nd percentile of Belgian seed-stage rounds all-time, a sizeable early cheque for a young biotech. It reflects growing investor appetite for AI drug discovery models grounded in patient biology rather than chemistry alone.