Isomorphic Labs, which hasn’t yet disclosed a molecule or reached the clinic, breaks the recent trend of investors putting their money behind more mature and de-risked assets.
Alphabet’s AI-forward biotech Isomorphic Labs has brought in $2.1 billion, clocking what analysts say is “the second largest biotech round of all time.”
“Over the past two years, AI-native drug developers have been pushed away from platform promises and toward clinical specificity,” Ben Zercher, senior biotech and pharma analyst at PitchBook, told BioSpace in an email on Tuesday. Indeed, funding over at least the last year has shifted to later-stage assets as investors grow more risk-averse.
But given Isomorphic’s Alphabet backing and Google “DeepMind halo,” the company appears to be operating entirely outside of this paradigm, Zercher said Tuesday. “Rounds like these give tech capital a place to go in biotech, while the rest of the industry stays focused on getting drugs to patients—and that’s probably a healthy split.”
The largest biotech round ever belongs to Altos Labs, another AI-focused drug discovery engine, which emerged in 2022 with a massive $3 billion fundraising.
Isomorphic hasn’t yet disclosed a pipeline molecule. Instead, the series B haul will go toward the “continued development and deployment” of its AI drug design platform, according to the company’s press announcement. Rather than dedicating efforts to a specific disease target, machine learning models sit at the heart of Isomorphic’s engine, enabling work across different therapeutic areas and modalities, according to the biotech’s website.
The AI-forward approach also cuts down what the company called “time-consuming experimental work” and passes off most of the early benchwork to a computer—though this has yet to bear out in the clinic.
Isomorphic is “developing an internal drug candidate pipeline focused in oncology and immunology,” according to the biotech’s website. On Tuesday, the company said that the series B investment in its technology would in turn help accelerate and expand this pipeline toward the clinic.
The series B push was led by Thrive Capital. Parent company Alphabet—also parent to Google— participated in the round, as did Temasek, Capital G and the UK Sovereign AI Fund.
Isomorphic entered the game in 2021, built around a platform powered by the AlphaFold family of models that can accurately predict DNA, RNA and protein structures, as well as their interactions. AlphaFold won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. Isomorphic has since reached unicorn status.
In January 2024, Isomorphic secured separate big-ticket contracts with Eli Lilly and Novartis, which independently want to use the biotech’s AI engine to design and develop small molecule drugs for undisclosed targets. Lilly paid $45 million upfront and promised up to $1.7 billion in milestones, while Novartis fronted $37.5 million and put up to $1.2 billion on the line in contingent payments. In March 2025, the biotech raised $600 million in its first external funding round.
