A UK life sciences startup using AI to develop new medicines faster to treat diseases has raised $140m in funding, in an investment
round featuring AI powerhouses Nvidia and new investor Anthropic.
Basecamp Research, founded in 2019, is a
London-based startup that leverages AI and biodiversity data to design the next generation of treatments aimed at treating cancer, autoimmune and other diseases.
The $140m Series C round – which is large for a
Series C- was led by S32, the California venture firm founded by Bill Maris, founder of GV, the VC arm of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
Nvidia’s venture arm, NVentures, a returning
investor and Anthropic’s Anthology Fund, a partnership between Anthropic and US VC Menlo Ventures, a new investor, also joined the
round.
Other new investors are Catalio, the NATO
Innovation Fund, Rockefeller, European Tech Collective and the UK government’s
Sovereign AI Fund.
Returning investors include Firebrand, River
Capital King Philanthropies, and Redalpine.
The startup, which has raised $225m in total, said
it will use the funding to train a new generation of its AI models and advance
a pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics.
Basecamp is applying its Eden models, its biological
foundation AI models, to in vivo cell therapy- reprogramming a patient’s cells
inside the body.
Basecamp says that current cell therapies are
limited both in the complexity of what they can deliver and by a
manufacturing process that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient.
By pairing its AI models’ ability to design long
and complex DNA sequences with specialised enzymes that can precisely deliver
them, Basecamp aims to make cell therapies more sophisticated, more
customisable and simpler to administer.
It says the funding round follows strong preclinical
results across multiple disease areas.
Basecamp trains frontier AI models for therapeutic
design. Its AI models are trained on what it says is the world’s largest
proprietary genomic dataset, collected through partnerships in more than 30
countries worldwide.
It says its pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics,
beginning with in vivo cell therapy, is advancing towards clinical development.
Basecamp was founded by doctor Glen Gowers and doctor Oliver Vince. The startup’s roots date back to the co-founders’ PhD studies in synthetic biology and bioengineering and a 2019 expedition to Iceland’s Vatnajökull ice cap, where they set up the first off-grid DNA sequencing operation.
Gowers said: “We believe the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to
repair itself. We design the models and the medicines to teach it how.cAI-based
approaches promise to change what’s possible for patients who currently have
few alternatives. This funding brings this technology closer to those who need
it most.”
Sovereign AI head of ventures Joséphine Kant said: “Glen and Oliver met as undergraduates at Oxford, and rather than taking the obvious path, they dragged a portable lab to the Arctic to do something no one had done before: sequence DNA completely off-grid. That instinct – to go where no one else has been and come back with something new – runs through everything they’ve built since. They could build this company anywhere in the world, but they’re unapologetically proud to be doing it here in the UK. The best founders make you believe the impossible is only a matter of time, and Glen and Oliver are doing exactly that.”