Pharmacelera Turned an EIC Accelerator Grant Into Drug Screening

Pharmacelera, a Barcelona company that sells software to find drug candidates with quantum chemistry, is active and better funded than at any point since it was founded in 2015. In February 2026 it closed a €6 million round led by Heran Partners, with Clave Capital, Inveready and Bio&Tech Smart Capital, to set up a permanent team in the United States, according to the company's press release and Capital Riesgo. The Spanish companies gazette recorded the matching capital increase, a new board and a move of the registered office to the Parc Científic de Barcelona in March 2026, according to the BORME.

Six years earlier, the European Commission selected Pharmacelera in the 8 January 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, with a grant only, for PharmScreen2, a "Holistic Quantum Mechanics Based Platform to Accelerate Drug Discovery", according to the Commission's list of selected companies. Pharmacelera is the only company listed for the project. The grant paid for software that is now on sale. The proof of concept with pharmaceutical partners that the project promised has not been published.

A Software Seller With New Money

Pharmacelera sells licences for three products, PharmScreen for virtual screening, exaScreen for ultra-large chemical libraries and PharmQSAR for statistical models built on lab data, and names Wren Therapeutics, Macrophage Pharma, Sibylla Biotech, ISGlobal and Sanifit among the organisations giving testimonials, according to its website. It says it has worked on more than 100 projects and has repeat business from three large pharmaceutical companies and several biotechs, according to the February 2026 funding release. None of these customers is named in a public contract or results announcement.

The company's register file is busy. The March 2026 entries record two capital increases, from €52,031 to €85,520 in nominal share capital, the departure of three directors and the arrival of Raf Roelands of Heran Partners and of Aticus Corporate, represented by Ignacio Prieto, on the board (BORME, 24 March 2026). Capital Riesgo names Prieto as the Clave Capital representative. In August 2026 the register recorded a capital reduction of €3,321, to €82,199 (BORME, 27 August 2026). The reason for the reduction is not stated. No insolvency entry appears in the register history listed by Empresia, which shows the company as active.

The Technology: Molecules Described by How They Meet Water

Computer-aided drug design tools rank millions or billions of molecules against a target before any are made. Most compare molecules by their shape and by simple chemical features. Pharmacelera's method, which the company says rests on more than 25 years of research and which it develops with the University of Barcelona among its listed partners, describes each molecule by its hydrophobicity in three dimensions, calculated with a quantum mechanical version of the Miertus-Scrocco-Tomasi solvation model, and uses that field to line up and compare molecules. The method and its validation were published in 2018 by company staff and university researchers in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.

The company's pitch is that this finds active molecules with different chemical scaffolds from the known ones, and so new patentable starting points. Co-founder Javier Luque said in 2022 that comparative studies showed PharmScreen finding molecules "three times better", and co-founder Enric Herrero said studies against Schrödinger's software showed "the superiority of our algorithms" (both translated), according to a Parc Científic de Barcelona press release. Those comparative studies are not public, and no independent benchmark of the claim was found. The 2026 claim that its QaiM engine produces molecules "up to 10 times better and 75,000 times faster" than earlier AI approaches is also the company's own.

What changed after the EIC project is scale. In December 2022 Pharmacelera connected Enamine's REAL database of more than 5.5 billion make-on-demand compounds to its screening tool, according to Enamine. The product was named exaScreen. In May 2024 the partners extended it to Enamine's REAL Space of 48 billion compounds, and Enamine took a licence to use exaScreen in-house, according to the joint release. In March 2026 Chemspace added its Freedom Space 5.0 of 296 billion compounds, according to the Chemspace release.

What PharmScreen2 Promised and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 13 May 2020 and the project ran from 1 September 2020 to 31 August 2022, on time, with an EU contribution of €958,702.50 towards a total cost of €1,369,575.00, according to CORDIS. Its stated aim was "to finalise the development of PharmScreen2, PoC with industrial partners and prepare the new PharmScreen2" for the market. It promised a platform that would simulate activity and ADME-Tox properties (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity) together, raise the success rate of lead identification "by 3x" and cut the overall costs of drug design and development "by 25%". The company later rounded the grant to "1 million euros", according to the 2022 Parc Científic release.

The only report on the project's CORDIS reporting page is labelled period 2, for September 2021 to August 2022, but its text describes the first year. It reports improved search algorithms that use binding-site information, a method to search a chemical space "orders of magnitude bigger" than usual, ADME-Tox and off-target predictions built from the company's hydrophobicity descriptors with machine learning, a new API with a Python package for use on Amazon Web Services, and a revised web version. It says the partnerships with pharmaceutical companies "will enable us to validate the technology during the second phase". No final results, deliverables or publications from that second phase are listed.

1. Search ultra-large chemical spacesDeliveredReported on CORDIS; launched as exaScreen with Enamine in December 2022.
2. Market introductionDeliveredPharmScreen, exaScreen and PharmQSAR are sold on the website; Enamine licensed exaScreen in 2024.
3. Holistic ADME-Tox predictionPartly deliveredModels reported on CORDIS; no ADME-Tox product among the three listed on the website.
4. Proof of concept with industrial partnersNot achievedAnnounced as second-phase work; no results published by the company or a partner.
5. 25% lower drug development costsNot achievedNo evidence from the company or third parties.
6. 3x lead identification successCompany claim onlyClaimed in the 2022 release; the studies are not public.

PharmScreen2 was Pharmacelera's second Horizon 2020 grant. In 2018 it ran MolPredict, a six-month SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study with an EU contribution of €50,000, according to CORDIS, whose report already set the "3X" and "25%" targets. A CORDIS search for the company returns no other project. Pharmacelera does not appear on any of the 17 pages of the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which matches a grant-only award.

The Money and the Accounts

By December 2022 Pharmacelera had raised €3.7 million in public and private money, including a €1 million equity crowdfunding round on Capital Cell in 2021 that beat its €800,000 target, according to the Parc Científic release; the register shows a capital increase in September 2021, according to Empresia. The same release said the company would open a US base in early 2023 with a Silicon Valley investor and aimed to multiply sales by five within three years. The investor turned out to be General Inception: the register shows a capital increase in May 2023 and Venkateshwar Reddy, General Inception's chief scientific officer, on the board from that month (Empresia, and the 2026 funding release). The amount General Inception invested was not found in any source opened for this article. In February 2026 the US team was still described as a plan, the "establishment of a permanent team in the U.S.".

Few figures from the accounts are free to read. For 2022, Infoempresa lists revenue of €380,000, up 70.6%, equity of €2.66 million, a net loss of €40,000 and 12 employees. The company itself reported 70% sales growth for 2022 in the Parc Científic release, which gives its team as 20 people in the summary and 15 in the text. Whether sales grew fivefold by 2025 cannot be checked. The registers disagree on later filings: Empresia says accounts up to 2024 have been filed, while Infoempresa shows 2022 as the latest year. Empresia's free summary puts annual revenue below €500,000.

Why It Matters for Europe

The Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe, adopted in November 2020, aims to support the "competitiveness, innovation and sustainability" of the EU pharmaceutical industry and notes that the EU is "increasingly dependent on non-EU countries" for medicines and their ingredients. Computational drug design is a field long led by US software firms such as Schrödinger, which Pharmacelera names as its benchmark. A European supplier of screening software, working with compound libraries built by Enamine and Chemspace in Kyiv, fits that aim. But Pharmacelera's next stage of growth is aimed at the United States: its 2022 release said 95% of its clients were outside Spain, and the 2026 round is meant to build a US team.

The Verdict

Pharmacelera and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.